Win2D VS OpenTK

For Windows only, Win2D!

You're looking for Win2D: https://github.com/microsoft/Win2D. It's the official D2D WinRT wrapper, supports UWP and WinUI, has seamless interior with XAML, it's very easy to use and has extensive interop APIs (even more so once we ship the next release) that give you maximum control if needed. I recommend checking it out 🙂

Your easiest bet is likely to use Win2D within UWP or WinUI 3, then you could just throw a CanvasControl as the root of your UI and draw whatever you want on it, including setting individual pixels. Alternatively an easy way to do that could be to use a WriteableBitmap in WPF/UWP/WinUI 3 just drawn into a root Border or something, and then you can easily manipulate pixels there. Of course, that'd be slower and not CPU accelerated, but still viable depending on your exact use case.

Alternatively you can also try Win2D, which is an official wrapper for D2D available for UWP and WinUI. You could use its CanvasAnimatedControl panel and then do your drawing from there, and just manually draw all your particles. The actual drawing would still be GPU accelerated, so it'd be relatively efficient (though less than using a custom shader, as you'd be queueing each particle from the CPU side).

To make a long story short, it's a UWP app since I've used DirectX 11 for drawing on the screen. I use C#, and I needed win2d (https://github.com/microsoft/Win2D)

Universal Windows Platform was introduced as the new hotness, but in my personal experience lacks a number of features from WPF I couldn't part with. It seems to have flopped a bit outside of applications developed by Microsoft. Projects that I though would bring features I really wanted (like win2d: GitHub - microsoft/Win2D) seem to have lost support. I'd hold off on this.

Open a new issue on Github. Include all of this, and provide info on your OS and GPU.

For anyone interested in getting into this: https://opentk.net/

OpenTK is probably the most known library for that.

I used OpenTK, an OpenGL framework for C# and hacked together a small app that renders a fullscreen textured quad (in this case OP's image) with a shader I found in this article.

i'd go for OpenTK so you don't have to learn c++ in addition. also one of the most important things is understanding how to communicate with the GPU and for that https://learnopengl.com/ is a great resource. (also creating a 3d engine is not really that much harder than a 2d engine in my opinion)

https://opentk.net/ for OpenGL

But OpenTK can, and you can use it within godot if you add it as a C# library with godot C# https://opentk.net/

https://opentk.net/ or https://www.libsdl.org/ might be for you

Thanks! I'm creating an engine (far from being ready for public use) while developing the game based on OpenTK which is pretty much like GLFW for C# (it is a bit more advanced than that though), so yeah pretty much from scratch.