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

[Br'fin <br...@ma...>]

On Friday, February 21, 2003, at 02:23  PM, Woody Zenfell, III wrote:

> 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.

At least MacOS X wise, a failed program is just tossed out and system 
Gamma resets on its own it would seem. Though a consideration for other 
platforms. My biggest problem, if anything, is that I never got 
multiple monitors working on MacOS X, then again I don't have a second 
monitor to play with.

A bigger color related problem is 256 colors under MacOS X, oof.

> 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.)
>
Cheaper memory wise, probably makes changing screen-size mid game a 
touch problematic. Especially for AlephOne and it's larger screen 
sizes. Doesn't really add any excess to copying because update_screen 
was already focusing on only a part of the screen.

The bigger overhead for software mode comes in the accidental triple 
buffering since AlephOne Carbon doesn't account for the MacOS X window 
back buffer

-Jeremy Parsons