Chris Muench - writing managed 3D app for mobile devices

(This is WinCE-compatible Win32 unmanaged C/C++ code but hopefully there a similar way to do it in WinCE managed C#.)

"Tom Miller posted a 'perfect' render loop" - I didn't see his render loop, but for games a simple yet effective loop that I use is this (pseudo-code):


while()
{
   PeekMessage(&msg)
   TranslateMessage(&msg)
   DispatchMessage(&msg)
   DoSomethingElseWithMessage(&msg)
   Clear(&msg)

   DoGameLoop()

   Sleep(0) // throw in a Sleep(0) or Sleep(1) if having timing issues
}

That is the basis of it.  You may want to loop to process all messages in the queue before calling DoGameLoop.  And you may want to only call DoGameLoop every 1/60 of a second or something (use QueryPerformanceCounter for timing).  But yeah basically that is it.

Ignore WM_PAINT by simply returning 0 and only draw the backbuffer to the screen in DoGameLoop and WM_ERASEBKGND messages (return non-zero for WM_ERASEBKGND).

Don't actually write game code in WNDPROC, just build a queue of received input and process the queue in DoGameLoop.

It is that simple and will speed up your game whether you are using GDI or Direct3D.


If graphics is another culprit of main slowdown, then figure out whether your platform supports accelerated 2d and/or 3d rendering.  If no 3d acceleration but yes 2d acceleration, then use 2d acceleration to make a faster 3d game (or just write a 2d game).  But to do that you'll need direct write access to video memory, which as far as I know the only 2d graphics API that gets you that is DirectDraw.  Though I don't know if DirectDraw exists for WinCE.

Otherwise you are stuck with GDI/GDI+ (only GDI+ for C#).  And if you use GDI and need pixel access use CreateDIBSection to create your backbuffer HDC's HBITMAP.