I just answered a similar question here.
NOTE: Depending on your needs, it is possible to achieve smooth animations under winforms (under certain conditions) though you are responsible for everything. wpf provides an animation framework but wpf is perhaps a milestone harder.
It probably does not matter should you pursue winforms first or WPF. You arguably could learn the basics under winforms then move over to wpf. wpf may require you to learn quite a bit before you can do anything.
Summary
Essentially what this does is to create an offscreen bitmap that we will draw into first. It is the same size as the UserControl. The control's OnPaint
calls DrawOffscreen
passing in the Graphics
that is attached to the offscreen bitmap. Here we loop around just rendering the tiles/sky that are visible and ignoring others so as to improve performance.
Once it's all done we zap the entire offscreen bitmap to the display in one operation. This serves to eliminate:
- Flicker
- Tearing effects (typically associated with lateral movement)
There is a Timer
that is scheduled to update the positions of all the tiles based on the time since the last update. This allows for a more realistic movement and avoids speed-ups and slow-downs under load. Tiles are moved in the OnUpdate
method.
If you note in the code for Timer1OnTick
I call Invalidate(Bounds);
after animating everything. This does not cause an immediate paint rather Windows will queue a paint operation to be done at a later time. Consecutive pending operations will be fused into one. This means that we can be animating positions more frequently than painting during heavy load. Animation mechanic is independent of paint. That's a good thing, you don't want to be waiting for paints to occur. xna does a similar thing
Please refer to my full SO answer complete with sample code