Zammy

The File Type method is not going much. I am doing it with effect plugin. Anyway I think I am going to do a stand alone application. This is getting too much work anyway.

Hmm... I am not sure what exactlly I am suppose to do with your advice. If you can give me a small snippet it would be great.

Another question, sorry but I am getting frustrated. I have been working on this for 2-3 days and it was not supposed to take so long How can I get the number of calls to Render() method in Effect class? (Aka, the number of rectangle pieces).

Ok thank you. So it is returning me just the reference to it. Good to know.

Thank you

Is CreateAliasedBitmap() the function to create Bitmap from Surface class? If not which is it?

You code snippet does not seem to run correct or I am not doing something right. I open a file with this plug-in. (I select from the drop-down menu when I open a file that it is with my file type). Then I try to save it and expect a new form to show up with the context of it inside a picture box right? Well it does not. I tried with save or save as. I am using the express edition so I am not sure how to make my VS debug it. I am not sure if OnSave() is being called. If it is. It should make a new window but it doesn't. Why? No idea If you have any clues that would be great. (Assumptions: OnSave() is called when you save the file.)

I am going to try with File Type plugin. I will keep the thread up to date.

Thank you for the code but is not clear what I am supposed to do with it. Its not commented either. Anyway I have started working with the Effect Template from Sepcot and I have done the UI Dialog box asking the user about input. Problem is after that when I try to render the animation into a new window things start getting nasty a little bit. I read in http://www.boltbait.com/pdn/codelab/help/overview.html that the Render method is called many times with different rectangle parts of the selected area. What I need is after the user has inputted his preference to just start a new Form with the whole surface inputted as Bitmap class. From there on I think I have written my Form class to dispaly the animation. Where to put my code after I have the input from the user? I have tried using the Render function but its called continuously which is not what I need. Thank you for your help.

Thank you for the sample btw. It helped me get going but I have a question. What are the inputs of this function: public override void Render(EffectConfigToken parameters, RenderArgs dstArgs, RenderArgs srcArgs, Rectangle[] rois, int startIndex, int length) parameters is my EffectPluginConfigToken where I get user input information. But the rest of the parameters are not very clear and there is no metadata for them. Thank you. On the topic of languages I agree that your choice of languages comes from the project but I will just mention that you can make game development with C# also (XNA). For windows programming I would not use anything else than C#. I am also on the same path you are and I feel awful that I will need to deal with C++, its a ugly mess for me to write on C++ and to read code almost impossible. C# sharp is clean, elegant and supports metadata which is very important for making code readable and usable. Just my 2 cents, I am just a student so you shouldn't really listen to me.

As such I want to create a plugin which will animate a PNG. It will draw in a different part of the PNG for certain time on a separate window. I downloaded the Effects Plug-in Template but I do not want to manipulate the canvas directly. Just take parts of it and draw it in a separate window. Can I create this through this Template? I am new to plug-in programming and programming in general but am pretty comfortable with C# and I think I can manage. Hints and advice well appreciated!

What I am looking for is a simple tool. PNG animation comes with drawing different parts of the png. That is how we are going to animate everything in our game. Basically draw different rectangular parts of the PNG for certain time in a small window. That is what I am looking for. It actually should be easy plug-in to make. Maybe I might spend some time on that. The APNG sounds good but it is an effort to use paint.net and then use another software to see the animation but is a solution for now. Thank you.

Me and a friend of mine will be using paint.net as our content creator. We will create the animations in png format but it would be great if we could actually see it working. If there are any animator plugins that work with png just point them. I tried to search the forum but takes too much time, I am rather inpatient