[added in 1.6] Rendering the Engine to a Control

[AFW2006]

is there a way to render to a Control ,like PictureBox or Panel ... ?

i found it hard to do that ,since it is not independent( ) .it would be better if you make it independent in feature realeases ,that will give it more control over your app .

just an idea .

[Silmaryls]

Yes you're right. There is no way to do that actually.

Brume is embedded into a Form.

I will try do do something for future release.

Thanks

[Silmaryls]

This feature will be available in 1.6.

[Dizzy]

Hello,
I'm currently trying to render my game into a control such as a form. What is the best way to do this? I've heard that using a directX viewport is possible. Any suggestions?/

thanks,

Dizzy

[Silmaryls]

Hi Dizzy,

Are you talking about your own DirectX engine ? If so, take a look at this file line 179

If you mean using Brume inside a Form, this is the default behaviour of the engine (Brume main class extends the Form class).
You can find a tutorial here.

Silmaryls

[Dizzyka]

I have an existing control that I'd like to put a brume game into like a child form. I've been looking into MDI children and the like. For instance what I'm trying to do is say I have a form with a bunch of tabs on it, I'd like to put the game window inside a tab. Or just in the middle of the form. I can't add a form to a tab page because I get the error that I can't add a top level control.

[Silmaryls]

Hi,

I think you must use Brume form as your main component, then add your tabs inside that form.
If you can add a panel or another component inside one of the tabs, all you have to do is tell Brume to render in that component instead of the main form (doing this will allow you to display all other components like tabs) :

Code: Select all

this.ControlToRender = anotherControl;   // 'this' here is the main form (Brume class)
                                                             // 'anotherControl' is the control you added inside your tab


With these settings Brume will now show Windows.Forms controls and will render only in 'anotherControl'.
There is also a sample of that in our demo (you can look into Game class constructor)

[Dizzyka]

Thank you very much! That worked. I tricked my form designer into letting me design a brume form (can't normally because its trying to make an instance of an abstract class) by doing #if DEBUG. This works great but the one catch is that I have to declare the control to render in the form constructor to make it render to the panel I want and the form generated code by the designer doesn't initialize the panel until after the constructor, leaving me with a null reference error. I got around this by just making my panel = a new panel right up top in the variable declaration. Just FYI if anyone else is having problems.

[Dizzyka]

Actually, I've found being able to use the form designer to add things to the Brume form to come in very handy. The reason the form will not open in the designer is because the designer actually tries to make an instance of everything in your code. It fails because it would have to instantiate an abstract class with your class inheriting Brume.Brume. To get around this simply put preprocessor directives surrounding your constructor like this:

#if DEBUG
public class SomeForm : Form
{
#else
public class SomeForm : Brume.Brume
#endif

Also you have to do this with all code that would call brume specific overrides and methods. To switch between debug and release modes simply select debug or release from the drop down next to the green play button in the .NET IDE. Selecting debug will make your fake SomeForm : Form declaration active and allow you to open your class in the form designer. You'll run into little annoyances with the designer adding code in the wrong places and having to swap code back and forth between the DEBUG and normal declarations as with any hack but its so much easier!

[Silmaryls]

Hi Dizzyka,

Thanks for the infos. That might be helpfull for people designing .NET components.

Silmaryls