I think I've given up with the idea of retrofitting my Klondike game with the new rendering method. It is too dependent on the current method. I might as well rewrite it. And that's what I think I might do. I've got an idea to make some classes that implement a visual hierarchy in one canvas in REALbasic. What's the point of that? Not much, probably. In RB 4.5 there will be support for a visual hierarchy at the control level. So you can drag on control onto another in the visual editor and that control will become the child of the enclosing control. That's pretty good. But the other thing I need is the ability to draw some part of the window into a picture. I need that to do smooth updating. Draw just the part of the window that needs updating into a picture and blit that picture directly onto the screen. Windows have a DrawInto method, but that doesn't do what I want. The origin is 0,0 and you can't specify only a part of a window. But if everything draws in one canvas, then you can do it. You'd set the origin of that canvas up and to the left and then let everything draw normally into the picture. You'll get, in the picture, just that part you want.
I even have a name for my visual hierarchy system: Boxes. The Box will be the fundamental drawing element of the BoxCanvas. Everything else will be a subclass. I can have a TextBox, a CheckBox, a PictureBox, etc.
Hmm. This is really sounding useless. But fun :)
10:45:21 AM #
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