Drawing to HDC

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03-07-2006
Ichmael™

Drawing to HDC

I was jst staring at my wall, it's covered in diagrams and various formulas from past projects, one of them was my opengl gui lib which I never even finished. All of a sudden I have an urge to start a similar experiment.

I am wanting to create my own API for drawing on a "canvas" I guess you could say. Now, say all of my drawing operations have finished and it's all been processed into a bitmap. Should I just go ahead and patblt or something? Is this the best way to do it?? Is there a quicker way to draw a bitmap on the screen? Do I have to use a DC and do I have to use the Win32API to access it?

It's nearly 3am so I'm probably making no sense, and I did search and I'm pretty sure that I do need to use a DC and can't just manipulate the memory block for my "canvas" directly.

How, for instance, does OpenGL draw to the screen?
03-07-2006
bithub

Use BitBlt

Quote:

Do I have to use a DC and do I have to use the Win32API to access it?

Yes

Quote:

How, for instance, does OpenGL draw to the screen?

OpenGL accesses the video card directly through its OpenGL driver.
03-07-2006
anonytmouse

If you wish to manipulate the raw memory of a bitmap, you can use a dib section. However, as Bithub pointed out, you will still ultimately have to use BitBlt to copy it to the screen or a window. Otherwise, you might be able to use DirectX or OpenGL to copy to the screen.
03-07-2006
Ichmael™

I see, interesting. Thanks guys. That'll give me a start at least.
03-09-2006
Ichmael™

Ok, so I've created a scene graph sort of system I guess you would call it using all my own drawing functions which are as yet pretty well untested. All my operations should go onto a temporary DC and then BitBlt to the destination DC correct?

Basically it's like draw a circle with radius from point x,y draw bitmap cx,cy at x,y etc and I just copy bits from buffers into a final bitmap like memory block... Is this making sense? If so, can anyone offer any resources (perhaps links to opensource drawing applications or something so I can perhaps get some ideas as to the best way to do all this)... I've had a bit of a search on places like sourceforge and such but I haven't found much relevant info yet.
03-09-2006
bithub

Quote:

All my operations should go onto a temporary DC and then BitBlt to the destination DC correct?

Yes, if you want to do double buffering. If you don't want to double buffer your scene, then just draw directly to the HDC.

As for resources, a good place to start would be the Windows GDI page.