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C# Game GUI using usercontrols

Started by rpiller Feb 19, 2012 at 2:52 PM 1 reply 1.8k views

Original Post

Feb 19, 2012 at 2:52 PM

I have a graphics library where someone has created a control to where all the 3D content is rendered to. Sort of like a picturebox if you will. Game GUI's have always been a pain to me. The way I see it .NET already has an amazing framework for GUI's so why not use their framework and have it sit on top of the 3D rendering control to act as the GUI? To get the look and feel usercontrols will most likely need to be created which I'm OK with but no need in reinventing all the event handling and such.

Does anyone know if there is already such C# game GUI library out there that uses the default .NET controls as their base?

Do you think there would be any drawbacks to this? I would think one could make it so you couldn't even tell that the controls weren't created and rendered from the graphics library itself.

Dynamo_Maestro

Feb 19, 2012 at 8:06 PM

With SlimDX you can easily use WPF controls and have them as your game UI, in terms of game UI I am on the same boat as you, they are a pain to do, although you can easily make use of WPF (and I guess Win Form) UI in SlimDX I am yet to know if this is considered a performance friendly way of doing game UI oppose to app UI, my concern really comes from how Maya ended up although I doubt a game would ever have remotely even a fraction of the controls you get in Maya.

Anyway to answer your question, yes you can easily and freely use ALL .net controls from WPF and WinForm integrating them with your 3D app in SlimDX and so far I havent seen any performance / framerate issues doing it this way. Ironically this isnt as smooth in XNA and usually has a mountain of visual problems, well for me at least it does.

rpiller

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rpiller

Feb 21, 2012 at 2:45 PM

So the graphics engine I'm using is based on OpenGL. Someone has created a .NET control that displays the 3D content. So not sure if this SlimDX will work in that case. Since this is a control I can place on a Win Form I was more thinking putting buttons and such on top of the OpenGL control itself. If I could get some transparency I would think this would work.

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