A few drawing questions

["Mark A. Nicolosi" <mark a nicolosi gmail com>]

Hi, I'm working on a game and I was wondering what would be best to use for
drawing? I'm having a hard time figuring out how all the different drawing
APIs fit together. As far as I can tell there is GDK, Cairo, GnomeCanvas
(dead?), and other things like GooCanvas. Everything get's drawn to a gdk
window in a drawing area, right?

I want to draw a map (a bunch of tiles) to the screen. Also I'll need to
draw things on top of this, like nicely rounded, semi-transparent area with
information when a user requests more information on a certain entity in the
map. Eventually, I'd like to do small visual effects, like animating water
(nothing fancy) and moving the player character around without jumping from
tile to tile.

I've played around with gdk a little bit. I ended up drawing the entire map
to a gdk window (256x256 tiles and tiles are 32x32 pixels) and put it inside
a ScrolledWindow. But as you can imagine that ate up a lot of memory. I
guess the right approach would be to only have the drawing area as big as
will fit in the window and then update it when the area is scrolled?

I'm programming in C#, but I decided to post here instead of gtk#, because I
think there's more people here. Thanks for the help.

--
Mark A. Nicolosi