Dialog and Menu Background color transparency

Fonte Boa · (This post was last modified: 11-19-2016, 08:50 PM by Fonte Boa.)

Not a bug, but a lost resource.

A very confortable Wings3D interface resource, specially when working with more complex geometry, is the Dialog and Menu Background color transparency (Alpha slider)(A slider) By this resource, it was possible to set a transparency level to those window and menu.

Go to Edit|Preferences, go to User Interface tab, and click on the color of Dialog Background and Menu Background.

The pictures show the A(lpha) slider (present in 1.5.3) and its absence in 2.1.3.

Fonte Boa · 11-21-2016, 05:44 PM

Is it very hard to redesign the second window to add an Alpha (transparency) slider?

micheus · 11-21-2016, 06:49 PM

(11-21-2016, 05:44 PM)Fonte Boa Wrote: Is it very hard to redesign the second window to add an Alpha (transparency) slider?

I cannot say much about this, but you must have noticed UI now uses the native OS windows/dialog/menus.

Fonte Boa · 11-21-2016, 08:53 PM

I noticed in Preferences|User Interface the option "Use the OS native color dialog".
When i ticked it, close Preferences window and open it again, i can see native Windows color dialog. And if i do it again, i can see another variation (not Windows scheme).

Is this other one native Mac OS?
Or is it a Wings specifc one? (if so, this would be the ideal window to add Alpha slider).

tkbd · 11-22-2016, 12:11 PM

Fonte Boa Wrote:Is this other one native Mac OS?

In MacOS, Wings3D use both of color pickers,Native Color picker and Wings and Color picker
(Both picker has an alpha value slider,but Native picker's alpha value is no changeable)

[Image: th_w3d_native_col_chooser_zpsflkesmbn.png]

Menu Background : Color OK / Alpha OK (RMB Menu Only)

[Image: th_w3d_menu_alpha_set_zpsb6kc2nzb.png]

[Image: th_w3d_menu_alpha_zpsr7qvs5ip.png]

But Window background, alpha value change cause derker.
Window Background : Color OK / Alpha NG

[Image: th_w3d_window_alpha_zpsmftpew9y.png]

I did an UI coloring test on Wings3D v1.5.4 and v2.1.3.(The alpha value is set for some colors.)
This test shows where is the color scheme in the UI for you set will be reflected.
You can also understand where color customization is possible by new version.

Test color scheme

[Image: th_w3d_col_scheme_test_zps1jd9gdc6.png]

[Image: th_w3d_col_scheme_test2_zpsg2nhfodp.png]

Wings3D 2.1.3

Wings3D 1.5.4

[Image: th_w3d_154_col2_zpsf4zwtump.png]

As a problem peculiar to the Mac...
In wings3D 2.x.x later, Frames or drop shadows are not attached to the RMB menu's ui element.(The images reference above)
Geometry and RMB menu Visibility is lost when the background coloring is similar color scheme.
Someone please fix this Sad

Fonte Boa · (This post was last modified: 11-22-2016, 03:26 PM by Fonte Boa.)

Tkbd, this is very different when using Windows 7: there is no Alpha slider here!
Dgud and Micheus: can you confirm this?

micheus · (This post was last modified: 11-22-2016, 04:49 PM by micheus.)

I can't say much about that. dgud is the right person to do this. Anyway...

(11-22-2016, 03:26 PM)Fonte Boa Wrote: Tkbd, this is very different when using Windows 7: there is no Alpha slider here!

Even in Windows 10.

None OS allow us to handle the three mouse buttons' click in menus. So, to ensure we were not loosing this feature the context menu (RMB) still uses a custom code. That can explain why tkbd is able to set transparency for them.

As in the Preferences dialog the custom color dialog (with the Alpha slider) is available for the backgrounds items I believe that at some point this functionality would be extended (or brought back).

As I could find when searching for window's transparency in wxWidgets it seems to be possible implement that, but it again requires some customization. Do that sometimes have a price. Different OS's behavior, changes made in a new version break things, ..., can compromise the custom code and that can require a kind of maintenance I don't know if it worth. (my thoughts)

Remembering why the old one was replaced:

(10-16-2016, 10:45 AM)dgud Wrote: ...
The ugly gui, needed a rewrite, sorry if you don't like the new one, but the old one
was written in OpenGL and we could not develop it any further, to much work..

I really can't see any advantage in have the dialogs/menus translucent since most the time they cover something temporarily.

dgud · 11-23-2016, 08:11 PM

A year ago it wasn't possible to do transparency in wx, so I removed the possibilty to change that in the dialog.

Since then I have added that functionality wx, seen when doing drag window before attaching the windows.
I have not had time to investigate if we can make the menus transparent on windows, on the Mac it just works.

I can take a look when I have time but it is very low priority on my list.
And the windows native dialog can do alpha values, you will have use wings builtin color dialog for that.

micheus · 11-23-2016, 11:41 PM

(11-23-2016, 08:11 PM)dgud Wrote: I have not had time to investigate if we can make the menus transparent on windows, on the Mac it just works.

I can do that since you say it could work.

micheus · 11-28-2016, 11:23 AM

I checked the code and it is ready for use transparency in accord with dgud already said and tkbd shown in the pictures. It really seems to be a Windows issue.
In the wxWidgets library documentation we can find some notes related to transparency in which they say only Linux and OSX can handle it:

Quote:...
Under wxGTK and wxOSX, you can use wxBG_STYLE_TRANSPARENT to obtain full transparency of the window background. Note that wxGTK supports this only since GTK 2.12 with a compositing manager enabled, call IsTransparentBackgroundSupported() to check whether this is the case
...