Posted by member 12025 on 2005-10-11 01:03:27 link
There are five kinds of transparency for LS modules, and maybe even more:
1. Magic pink, fake. #ff00ff (rgb 255,0,255) is transparent. This is bilevel. Any magic pink pixel will be completely gone. However, it will create a background to fit the rest of the space, as Win9x (apparently 98SE and ME can do a bit better) had trouble with real transparency. So, if you have a circle, with magic pink outside, it will fill in the full square with the background.
2. Magic pink, true. This will not create a background to fill the space. In the circle example, it will look and act just like the circle was not actually a rectangular thing.
3. Alpha, fake. This will make the module's display translucent to some degree, but create the background from the screen below. If you move it, it will either have to be smart enough to redraw, or it will look out of place.
4. Alpha, true. The module will be made translucent, and not have its background created from what is below, but actually be translucent. This uses Windows itself to do the job. It has the benefit of looking nicer than the fake version, and often being much faster, as a fair portion of the drawing can be done in video hardware.
5. Alphamap. Here, a 32-bit PNG is typically used, with a single alpha layer. This allows each pixel to have its own opacity, and can be combined with normal Windows transparency (#4).
I don't know if there is any module out there, even xLabel, that actually uses all five of these, but I know it at least does 2-5. Once you start using a newer xLabel, hopefully that will help get whatever you're trying to get done, done. Also, #4 and #5 require Windows 2000 or better (technically I think they work in NT4 by now, but pretty much nobody uses it anymore, so there aren't a lot of ways to check it out).
1. Magic pink, fake. #ff00ff (rgb 255,0,255) is transparent. This is bilevel. Any magic pink pixel will be completely gone. However, it will create a background to fit the rest of the space, as Win9x (apparently 98SE and ME can do a bit better) had trouble with real transparency. So, if you have a circle, with magic pink outside, it will fill in the full square with the background.
2. Magic pink, true. This will not create a background to fill the space. In the circle example, it will look and act just like the circle was not actually a rectangular thing.
3. Alpha, fake. This will make the module's display translucent to some degree, but create the background from the screen below. If you move it, it will either have to be smart enough to redraw, or it will look out of place.
4. Alpha, true. The module will be made translucent, and not have its background created from what is below, but actually be translucent. This uses Windows itself to do the job. It has the benefit of looking nicer than the fake version, and often being much faster, as a fair portion of the drawing can be done in video hardware.
5. Alphamap. Here, a 32-bit PNG is typically used, with a single alpha layer. This allows each pixel to have its own opacity, and can be combined with normal Windows transparency (#4).
I don't know if there is any module out there, even xLabel, that actually uses all five of these, but I know it at least does 2-5. Once you start using a newer xLabel, hopefully that will help get whatever you're trying to get done, done. Also, #4 and #5 require Windows 2000 or better (technically I think they work in NT4 by now, but pretty much nobody uses it anymore, so there aren't a lot of ways to check it out).