Hi I''ve just written a profiler library for my game engine, but there''s something I wish to do, which I am having problems doing. My libraries are being designed so that they are plug and play from any type of windows application (MFC, win32 SDK, console applications etc), and the profiler so far can get the timings for blocks of code and dump the stats in a buffer. However, I want to be able to see the stats real time, every frame (or dump), instead of showing them in a console application, and I want to do this generically from any type of application. What I decided would be the best way to do this would be to dump the stats at the end of each frame to a modeless dialog box (which eventually could also contain other debug information). This leads me to my problem. The way the profiler is designed at the moment, the dialog can only be updated every dump. This might be a long time if we are say loading a level and profiling how long it takes to load, as a dump will only be at some point in the game code. I want the dialog to be updated a lot quicker, so it actually behaves like a real window, and so the best way I decided on doing this would be to have a profiler thread. Anyway I''m having a problem with the thread, and am wondering two things. 1) Can anyone think of a better way to solve this problem? 2) Does anyone know of any useful documentation which might help me. The program gets as far as creating the window in the new thread, but then leaves the thread when it gets to the GetMessage() function and never returns to it. I presume creating new windows in new threads isn''t like creating windows in normal applications

Thanks antareus

I''ve pretty much got it working now. After a bit of research and a cup of coffee I decided it was best to use PeekMessage() rather than GetMessage(), and messages are sent across with the PostThreadMessage() function. Synchronisation is also handled by creating an event in the main thread, and setting the event when the message queue has started up. Also the profiler thread is only really used for dialog processing, most of the profiler implementation is done in the main thread.

By the way, would anyone be interested in an article about how I created this profiler. I feel it is a very useful tool, and that it is about time I made a contribution to the Gamedev community.

yeah you can query the profiler stats too, and the dialog is only created on demand.

I''m eventually going to write a seperate library solely to display a dialog box which has lots of debug and profiling features, allowing you to do stuff like change variables on demand, and of course having a multi-page profiler in it as well.

At the moment though it is the profiler interface that creates the dialog box, although I have made sure to keep the dialog code well away from the profiling code so it doesn''t interfere