Contents  Introduction  The Basics  The Mouse  Using DirectInput  Drawing the Mouse  Stay Tuned...  Printable version     The Series  Part I  Part II  Part III  Part IV

Start With The Basics - The Rendering Loop

I'm going to start at the top, by defining a function that will calculate and draw one frame of our GUI system. Let's call this function RenderGUI(). In PDL, RenderGUI does something like this:

void CApplication::RenderGUI(void)
{
   // get position and button status of mouse cursor
   // calculate mouse cursor's effects on windows / send messages
   // render all windows
   // render mouse
   // flip to screen
}

Pretty straightforward for now. Basically, we grab the new position and status of the mouse cursor, calculate any changes that are caused by the new data, render all our windows, render the mouse cursor, then push the whole thing to the screen.

Next : The Mouse