Hi! Im making this messaging program for local networks in Visual Basic and i want the users who receive messages to be able to see them when they are playing a full screen game (e.g. Counterstrike). Thanks ! [edited by - 1adi on March 29, 2004 10:53:06 AM]

Thanks for the reply! I found something interesting in a Internet cafe somewhere . They had a program that flashed a yellow stripe at the botom of the screen with a message. Maybe i could find some usefull information about interfering with the DirectX/OpenGl

How about minimizing all the apps. Would that work with Directx/OpenGL games? I need some sample code to figure out how to do this.Thanks!

G''day.. I actually spent a week or so looking into this using VB .net . My aim, much like yours, was to splash a box up on the screen with someone''s message received from my IRC client mIRC (which had to have a special script installed to be able to send the message to my VB app). All I did was to get VB to show a form topmost that didn''t use up a taskbar slot and didn''t gain focus (ie, windows won''t alt tab automatically to this program) that only covered a small bit of room on the bottom of the screen. Unfortunately, this box flashed and flickered to no end much like MSN will do when someone signs in and you''re playing CS. I think that the refresh rate for the game was competing with the refresh rate for the window that popped up.
In some recent work I''ve been doing with DirectShow I''ve found that you can use DirectShow to do an overlay. It''ll show *something* over the top of something else.. much like watching a movie full screen with a smaller screen in the top right hand corner. This wouldn''t have any flickering problems. However, I believe you''d have to build this little popup message box into the actual game engine itself.
Ultimately, without editing the code for the game itself I doubt you''ll be able to pull this idea of ours off with just a window popping up. Quite simply because no matter what you get to show this window it''s still going to have refresh problems when competing with CS. Your only chance I would think would be to somehow change Windows ideas of where the top (or bottom) bounds of the screen are so that when CS runs full-screen it doesn''t actually occupy the full screen. Your program will then use this reserved space instead. If you''re familiar with dual-monitor setups and how to position a form on a virtual desktop then you''d know how to position this form in the reserved space - it''s quite easy once you know how.
I guess I rambled, but I hope it was helpful

- Ian

Thanks Ian! This is probably to complicated for my programming skills. I''ll try to minimize all the winndows instead , maybe get the system speaker to beep a couple of times.

it flickers cause the game is double buffered....you only see the window every other frame.

You would need to hook opengl and draw the message...only problem is the game may think it''s a cheat cause of the hooking, and get your key banned.