Simple Animation Using C#/Windows Forms

Simple animation using C#/Windows Forms

Set off a timer at your desired frame rate. At each timer firing twiddle the internal representation of the shapes on the screen (your model) per the animation motion you want to achieve, then call Invalidate(true). Inside the OnPaint just draw the model on the screen.

Oh yeah, and you probably want to turn Double Buffering on (this is like automatic page flipping).

How to create a smooth animation using C# Windows forms?

This post should solve your issues:
simple-animation-using-c-windows-forms

He details how he went around coding animation in a windows form and covers some of your questions.

If that doesn't solve it, look up using some XNA libraries as Freeman said.

Simple animation in WinForms

In some situations, it's faster and more convenient to not draw using the paint event, but getting the Graphics object from the control/form and painting "on" that. This may give some troubles with opacity/anti aliasing/text etc, but could be worth the trouble in terms of not having to repaint the whole shabang. Something along the lines of:

private void AnimationTimer_Tick(object sender, EventArgs args)
{
    // First paint background, like Clear(Control.Background), or by
    // painting an image you have previously buffered that was the background.
    animationControl.CreateGraphics().DrawImage(0, 0, animationImages[animationTick++])); 
}

I use this in some Controls myself, and have buffered images to "clear" the background with, when the object of interest moves or need to be removed.

How to create smooth animation movement of shapes in C# windows forms application?

The Winforms API, and the native Win32 window-messaging API on which it's built, is simply not designed for "smooth animation". It will be difficult, if not impossible, to achieve perfectly smooth animation.

That said, much can be done to improve on your attempt above:

• Don't use CreateGraphics(). Instead, always draw in response to the Paint event.
• Don't use any of the .NET timer implementations to schedule rendering. Instead, draw as quickly as you can, taking into account time between frames to update your object position.

Applying these ideas, here's a version of your code that works much better:

const float speedXPerSecond = 1000f / 30;
const int bar_width = 40;

public Form1()
{
    InitializeComponent();
    DoubleBuffered = true;
}

float x_position = 0;
TimeSpan _lastFrameTime = TimeSpan.Zero;
Stopwatch _frameTimer = Stopwatch.StartNew();

protected override void OnPaint(PaintEventArgs e)
{
    base.OnPaint(e);

    TimeSpan currentFrameTime = _frameTimer.Elapsed;
    float distance = (float)(currentFrameTime - _lastFrameTime).TotalSeconds * speedXPerSecond;

    x_position += distance;
    while (x_position > this.Width) x_position -= this.Width;
    e.Graphics.FillRectangle(Brushes.Black, x_position, 0, bar_width, 500);
    _lastFrameTime = currentFrameTime;

    Invalidate();
}

You can apply this general technique to any interactive scenario. A real game will have other elements to this general "render loop", including user input and updating game state (e.g. based on a physics model). These will add overhead to the render loop, and will necessarily reduce frame rate. But for any basic game on any reasonably recent hardware (e.g. built in the last couple of decades), the net frame rate will still be well above that needed for acceptably smooth game-play.

Do note that in the managed .NET/Winforms context, there will always be limits to the success of this approach as compared to using a lower-level API. In particular, without some extra work on your part, garbage collection will interrupt periodically, causing the frame rate to stutter slightly, as well unevenness in thread scheduling and the thread's message queue.

But it's been my experience that people asking this sort of question don't need things to be absolutely perfect. They need "good enough", so that they can move on to learning about other topics involved in game development.

How to add animations to windows forms elements?

I have used this APi, its simple and complete documentations is available at
http://code.google.com/p/dot-net-transitions/wiki/CodingWithTransitions

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