Original Post
Hi All,
I''m new to this forum, so please be patience with me, at least in my first post...
Currently I''m working on a cards game (Visual Basic 6.0), and I become rather obsessive in trying to make it look super professional. The program makes an extensive use of bitblt Api function to draw the cards as the are dragged around by the user, and when the mouse is released the card travels smoothly back to its original place. The technique I use is drawing in the background (hidden from the user) the background picture, then the mask and on top of that the sprite, which is
the card in this case, and finally everything is displayed on the screen.
Everything look nice and smooth in my new Pentium 4 PC, but when I tried it on an Old Pentium 200 Mhz machine, it looked rather awful, far too slow and with allot of flickering. Other professional games look almost equally smooth on both machines.
To boost up the drawing, I tried using memory DCs instead of picture boxes, but surprisingly, in a contraire to what I heard, all tests I made showed that there was not any advantage to memory DC over picture box when speed is in concern.
My questions to you guys are:
1. Do you have any suggestions on how I can speed up the graphics so it will look uniformly nice and smooth on all machines?
And please don''t advise me to move to c/c++ or to use directX. Let''s stay within the scope of VB and Api functions.
2. Perhaps a game loop (or I think it calls also a throttle) can help to solve this problem? Any suggestions (or preferably, a piece of code)?
Any help will be greatly appreciated.