Re: turning off display...

[Carlos Pereira <carlos pehoe civil ist utl pt>]

> I have a game app I'm working on.

> I'm using somebody else's board widget.  It's built using a ton of gdk
> calls.

> I want to be able to back up in a sequence of moves.  The easiest way of
> doing this is to clear the board and repaint from the beginning.

> When I do this, the user can see a sequence of moves being replayed.
> It's not the most pleasing thing to look at.

> Is there any simple way I can temporarily turn off display of changes,
> kind of like the refresh() call in curses, so that people won't see my
> changed board until the changes are complete?

> Please respond directly to me and I'll summarize.

Sorry, I didn't reply to your previous message.

I suppose you need to use a double-buffer mechanism,
so you can quietly build your image on the background
and then just swap the back and front buffer images.

This is a standard procedure with OpenGL graphic
routines, and you can also do it easily on a
standard drawing area, just using pixmaps
(there's a full example in Eric Harlow's
book, showing how to draw a analog watch
using a double-buffer with gtk1.2). 

For the other usual gtk widgets (buttons, 
boxes, tables, windows, etc...), gtk2.0 
is double-buffered automatically
so these problems don't exist, I believe.
gtk1.2 does not have a double-buffer though.
If you need a double-buffer of the gtk widgets
(note that this is totally different than the
drawing area, that I discussed above), I suppose 
you will be much better of with gtk2.0.

Carlos