Mycal
Staff member
Well, I've had some pretty long hours over the last 2 weeks so I haven't had much time to do anything. I haven't even read these forums until today, but I have had some free time yesterday and today and I am working on things.
I've been working on the GUI side of things and came to a couple or realizations. #1, either I'm doing it wrong, or drawing the ENTIRE GUI in DX is just very slow. I was making the main menu in DX and implementing my own textboxes, buttons, etc, but that was taking a long time, very buggy and just plain slow. I'm sure I could have made it work fine, but with how unresponsive it was (less than 15 FPS most of the time), it is not an ideal solution. So I moved to a separate form for the main menu.
#2, mixing WinForms and SlimDX is even worse than buggy. I tried not to draw at all while in the main menu, just skipping those routines altogether, but for some reason, anytime I minimized, or switched windows, the entire form would get repainted forcing some strange artifacts on the form, despite DX draw code not being called at all. A friend suggested checking out WPF instead of WinForms so that is currently what I'm working on.
WPF is a little strange. I don't know if I should call it amazingly complex, or amazingly simple. It has enough power that you don't need to write any actual code for most things as long as you design it properly. But it is also so easy to create a working form, that it's just plain simple. I'll just call it pretty amazing and leave it at that.
I'm not sure how I will have Odyssey use the form for creating your own GUI just yet, but I'll figure that out at a later time. Or, I could just dynamically load the form at runtime which would allow people to redesign it fairly easily using Microsoft Expression Blend (if they have it installed) or Visual Studio (Express versions too). Ok, that's what I'll go with since it is fairly simple to do.
So...here's a few screenshots to tide you over for now, though I really need to update SVN for the other devs <_<
Eep, client won't compile for other screenshots, so I'll update later with more..
Notes: Gui is subject to change, I just styled it after the old VB6 client since I really liked the simple look of it:
I've been working on the GUI side of things and came to a couple or realizations. #1, either I'm doing it wrong, or drawing the ENTIRE GUI in DX is just very slow. I was making the main menu in DX and implementing my own textboxes, buttons, etc, but that was taking a long time, very buggy and just plain slow. I'm sure I could have made it work fine, but with how unresponsive it was (less than 15 FPS most of the time), it is not an ideal solution. So I moved to a separate form for the main menu.
#2, mixing WinForms and SlimDX is even worse than buggy. I tried not to draw at all while in the main menu, just skipping those routines altogether, but for some reason, anytime I minimized, or switched windows, the entire form would get repainted forcing some strange artifacts on the form, despite DX draw code not being called at all. A friend suggested checking out WPF instead of WinForms so that is currently what I'm working on.
WPF is a little strange. I don't know if I should call it amazingly complex, or amazingly simple. It has enough power that you don't need to write any actual code for most things as long as you design it properly. But it is also so easy to create a working form, that it's just plain simple. I'll just call it pretty amazing and leave it at that.
I'm not sure how I will have Odyssey use the form for creating your own GUI just yet, but I'll figure that out at a later time. Or, I could just dynamically load the form at runtime which would allow people to redesign it fairly easily using Microsoft Expression Blend (if they have it installed) or Visual Studio (Express versions too). Ok, that's what I'll go with since it is fairly simple to do.
So...here's a few screenshots to tide you over for now, though I really need to update SVN for the other devs <_<
Eep, client won't compile for other screenshots, so I'll update later with more..
Notes: Gui is subject to change, I just styled it after the old VB6 client since I really liked the simple look of it:
