Faster Drawing Procedure

[Valsador]

Hey, I am making a program which is going to draw a lot of custom animations. Good thing is that its drawing are all custom buttons, lists, edit controls and etc. My question is: is there a way to speed the drawing procedure? Right now i am using BeginPaint and EndPaint.

I am also using non-mfc Code::Blocks, for windows XP

[Calculator]

Flicker Free Drawing (http://www.catch22.net/tuts/flicker.asp)

Clipping child windows

Sometimes flickering occurs because a parent window doesn't clip it's children when it paints itself. This results in the entire parent window contents being shown, and the the child windows being displayed on top (causing flicker). This can be easily solved by setting the WS_CLIPCHILDREN style on the parent window.

When a window has this style set, any areas that its child windows occupy are excluded from the update region. So, even if you try to draw over a child control, the clipping region that BeginPaint assigns will prevent you from doing so.

Avoiding deliberate overdraw

What I mean by this is the following type of situation. Say, you are custom-drawing the titlebar of a window. You draw the caption first, then draw some additional graphics over the top. Now, whenever the caption needs to be painted, it will flicker. This is because you haven't followed the "golden rule". In this case, the caption is being shown briefly before additional graphics are painted on top, which appear to flicker.

There are two techniques you can use to prevent this type of flickering. The first is to use clipping, the second is to use your brain.

In the case of clipping, you can use the ExcludeClipRect API call to mask out certain areas of a device context. When an area is masked, it is not affected when painted over. Once a background has been drawn, the clipping area can be removed with SelectClipRgn, and another graphic can be painted in the previously masked-out area. By using appropriate masking (or clipping), overdraw can be eliminated in alot of cases.

The other option is to take a more intelligent approach. Imagine you had to draw a grid. A grid would normally be painted by first drawing a blank background, and then drawing a series of lines (horizontal and vertical) to create the grid effect. The problem with this type of approach is that the grid lines will appear to flicker, because the background is briefly appearing underneath each line before the lines are drawn. However, the same effect can be achieved with a different approach. Instead of drawing a single blank background, draw a series of blank squares, separated by a pixel-wide space on each side. When you come to draw the grid lines, they can be placed in the pixel-wide gaps which haven't been painted over yet. The result is the same, but this time there is no flickering because no pixel has been painted over twice.

[__ant__]

The one of ways is using the DirectDraw technology.