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Suggestion: Transparency of Dockable Windows.

Posted: Sun Feb 25, 2007 1:16 pm
by Full Bleed
The dockable window interface in Maptools is really quite slick.

However, I think it could be even better if we were able to set individual hot/cold (mouse on/mouse off) transparency settings for each window so we'd have a more heads-up-display feel.

In the sample below, the Connection, Tree, and Macro windows are set at 10%. The Chat window at 30 so I could see new activity in it. When I mouse to the Chat window it might become 80 or 90. And assume that the Image Explorer is "Hot" and at 80% because I'm about to drag something out of it.

Image


And while I'm talking about the layout, a second less important suggestion I'd like to put out there would be to allow us to "save" and "load" various layouts. I could see a lot of good uses for this, not the least of which would be to further idiot proof the layout so "restore layout" wouldn't have to be used to get things back to a default if something went awry.

Posted: Sun Feb 25, 2007 1:52 pm
by trevor
Until we go to an opengl based rendering engine (probably some time in 2.0-2.2) the translucency would be horribly slow.

The layout saving though is do-able, I'll add a tracker

Posted: Sun Feb 25, 2007 5:01 pm
by LordShard
About that. Windows Vista drops support for OpenGL. 90% drop in speed from winXP according to tomshardware guide.

Posted: Sun Feb 25, 2007 5:09 pm
by trevor
That, that's gonna suck. We'll have to figure something else out.

Stinking MS nazis.

Posted: Sun Feb 25, 2007 9:39 pm
by Full Bleed
Good article on Open GL in Vista.

http://www.opengl.org/pipeline/article/vol003_7/


I'm a big fan of translucent windows... otherwise, I feel like I need a second monitor to offload tools. My planned setup is to use a VTT with a big screen LCD (in 1080p.) I hadn't thought much about having a second monitor in the room... but maybe it wouldn't be such a terrible thing to run the map on the big screen and have a smaller screen closer to me with all the toolbars and interface... that is, provided that MT can be run this way (with full-screen mode on one monitor and everything else on the other.)

Posted: Sun Feb 25, 2007 10:02 pm
by trevor
It can totally work that way, many people already use it that way. It's particularly useful because of the fog and los features (show the player view to the players, sneak up on them from the gm view).

You can go full screen mode for the second monitor to get rid of all the extra stuff