Re: [Alephmodular-devel] Re: [M-dev]Point of the backdrop_window?

[Woody Z. I. <woo...@sb...>]

On Friday, February 21, 2003, at 01:01  PM, Br'fin wrote:

> Seems like there should be a less memory intensive way of fading out 
> the other monitors, go figure.

FWIW when I wrote a small Mac game many, many years ago, the preferred 
way to fade the screen was through "gamma fades"; IIRC, there was a 
small freeware library called ColorGamma or something that I used.  
Anyway, my game simply left the non-game displays faded down to black 
(except when the menu was displayed or the program switched out, of 
course).  This may have other unpleasant effects (esp. in the case of a 
disorderly program exit), might not have worked on all Macs, or may not 
even be relevant anymore... but it didn't require the creation of any 
additional windows etc.

Just a thought.

Oh and on the main window being stretched to fill the screen - is that a 
good thing?  (Note to the casual reader - this is entirely different 
from the "Fill the Screen" checkbox which adjusts the display's 
resolution (in some cases).)  Would it be cheaper memory-wise, 
blitting-wise, etc. to use a totally black window in the background, 
whose contents might be able to be represented very efficiently, and 
whose contents never change, and a smaller full-color window that is 
sized to fit the portion of the display that's actually used?  (I'm sort 
of making this up as I go along... :) not sure how these things really 
work out in practice.)

Woody