Tracking mouse clicks within a group control

:wave: Hey Guys,

Glad to see some of the great minds are still here. I'm going to be frequenting this plethora of knowledge for the next couple of weeks as I attempt to complete my capstone software engineering class and finally get my undergrad. As usually I will typically need information or guidance. Since this is homework based. I have found my first issue. Allow me to digress....

The task given to my team is to create a checkers game which will have the capability to pay either player vs player or player vs cpu. Before I can begin to work on logic I need to cross the hurdle of detecting mouse movement. I have created the board which consists of 64 panels inside a groupbox. Each panel will have 4 images layers on top with the .visible property set to false. I am familiar with mouse click events to a degree but apparently lack some of the know how required.

Anyone know of any sources I can read referring to mouse clicks and how to track them? I'm pretty much trying to accomplish the following and don't know where to start. Mouse clicks aren't extensively covered in the documents/texts I have.

On click event
If mouse click is inside panel and mouse click is on checker image Then
Next mouseclick sets checker.visible = true (on next panel)
First checker.visible = false
End If

I could be way off here. I could be completely wrong uses just picturebox controls and may need to dive a lot deeper and create a checker piece class. I just don't know at this point.

Just looking for some guidance from experienced individuals. Good to see you all again.

Later.

To track the mouse you can use MouseMove event, MouseClick, MouseDoubleClick, MouseDown and MouseUp events (there are a couple of more exotic ones too).

The signatures for all these events look like this:
(ByVal sender As System.Object, ByVal e As System.MouseEvetnArgs)

The e agrument have x and y properties that will hold the current mouse cursor coordinates and its Delta property will hold the information about mouse wheel.
What else do you need?

P.S. Why using 64 panels instead of 1 picturebox?
Just draw everyting in one picturebox. It will be much easier than handling of 64 panels.

There are various ways to achieve your aim but I have to agree with cicatrix that there are far more efficient ways than what you describe. I'd suggest a single PictureBox containing a single Image of the playing board, then use GDI+ to draw the counters. Instead of having each square containing multiple PictureBoxes that you Show and Hide, just draw the Images of the counters wherever you need them and nowhere else. It will be far more efficient and not especially difficult. Follow the CodeBank link in my signature and check out my thread on manipulating GDI+ drawings. It's not exactly what you need but shows you how you can detect mouse events in various areas of the one control and how you can draw multiple "objects" onto a single control.

Alright,

So summing up what I got here. You both think it would be easier to have a single picture box and use GDI interface to track where the mouse clicks are taking place? By doing so I would alleviate the problem of having to stack 2+ images on each panel and would instead just have to create the starting amount of 24 game pieces and manipulate their movement through GDI?

Trust me I'm not doubting. I'm looking into it right now but in doing so wouldn't I have to set constraints that would reflect the positioning of each tile?

You should hold 2 image objects in memory - one for black and 1 for white pieces (or whatever colors you choose). Then you simply draw these images on the desired locations of the picturebox.

(You'd better have a square picturebox, but a rectangular one will do also, but it will look weird). So I assume that Width = Height

Dim sz As Double = PictureBox1.ClientRectangle.Width / 8

Now, to place something at position 5,5 just multiply by this quotient

Dim ActualPixelsX = 6 * sz
Dim ActualPixelsY = 6 * sz
' Squares are indexed from zero: 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 - that's why it's six, not five

yeah John, I need to pick up on some of that. I think your right. Thats the way to go.

Thanks Cicatrix,

I'm starting to get a picture in my head here. I'm new to GDI

I mean new as in never used it before. I'm going to pick up some documentation, or a book.

Ok you guys were definitely right. Single image, track mouse clicks through a click event to yield the X and Y cords. I can cross reference which tile on the board is being selected by dividing the X and Y both by 60, the size of a single playing tile, to determine where the piece needs to move.

Now I need to load the arrays and test my logic muhahahaha!

Thanks for the advice, and thanks for the how-to JM. Same to you Cicatrix!