PNG transparency

by **FlatBoy** » Mon Feb 09, 2009 11:46 am

Tranparency allow you to much nicer skin.
for ex. If you want to add some texture (grain) or light fx to your mixer you can't because the led, knob and switch won't match with you bg.

Without transparency or a masking color the bg stay flat. Nowadays it's consider a bit dull.

Jouni implemented PNG 24bit format not the 32bit with transparency

by **suneel** » Mon Feb 09, 2009 1:30 pm

richard what are the downfalls of using openGL or d3d primitives to do such tasks?

eg - you can load rgba texture and paste it on a polygon.
eg - you can show hide timeview on main toolbar

is it because it will be overkill? or you dont want dependency on graphics card? or too much programming?

by **Richard** » Mon Feb 09, 2009 1:45 pm

CPU usage, lib dependency, development time...? idk if I have time, it'd be an interesting idea to try that out.

by **bones** » Mon Feb 09, 2009 11:06 pm

Here's an example of what could be done with the Mixer if skinning got fixed.

If you want, you can use this mixer as a compact mixer. You won't be able to adjust the Sends or EQ, but for those who want a smaller mixer while they work, this could fit the bill. You can still adjust the volume and pan, as well as access the Mute/Solo/Bus buttons in this mode, you just need to swap to a different skin to make full adjustments, as we discussed in another recent thread. It's just the Mixer/Master, everything else will go to the Default skin. Just unzip it into the "Skins" folder.

http://www.novakill.com/stuff/SHORTskin.zip

Rich, you can try this skin to see what the issues are - all the hot-spots overlap so you can't adjust anything properly.

by **Vicious_Angel** » Tue Feb 10, 2009 7:28 am

Nice layout bones.
The colors are not so for me but is this skin smaller than the default one?
I mean do you see more channels than the default into 1 screen?

by **Jouni** » Sat Feb 14, 2009 8:53 am

I researched a lot of the skinning graphics stuff and most likely at somepoint it will be using Cairo for the graphics. It's rather nice, not too overbloated and cross platform. As an example use of Cairo, it's is base of Firefox's SVG rendering and since Firefox 3 it's used for all UI.

For the PNG transparency question, no it's not supported right now. Shouldn't be too hard to add though. My primary goal was to get atleast the PNG file format supported inplace of bmp files.