Jump to content

Aero Glass for Win8 RC4


bigmuscle

Recommended Posts


Hi Bigmuscle

Are you running your computer with Nvidia graphics?

None of your versions have been working for me.

I am on a Radeon HD7970

Windows crash after opening 2-4 windows

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Hi Bigmuscle

Are you running your computer with Nvidia graphics?

None of your versions have been working for me.

I am on a Radeon HD7970

Windows crash after opening 2-4 windows

I ran 0.3 on my 6950 and it ran great, I haven't tried 0.4 or 0.5 though.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

FAO BigMuscle...

I have a "feature request" for you to consider...

Can your application read the active window RGB when active or when first run and if so, could it automatically set the ColorizationColorInactive values to a matching/complimentary shade - just X% lighter or darker? (e.g. if the active window is FF0000, have inactive borders set to 880000 or FF6666). It should be relatively simple to create a formula to calculate the offset from the active "base colour"

If so, you could add a registry setting for that offset - perhaps have 128 (decimal) as meaning "the same as active" and higher values make inactive borders lighter, lower values make them darker - with 0x000000 being a "switch" meaning "unaffected" or "off" so users still have the option to set the colours manually).

If you can do that, it would make it very easy for ORelio to add a colour picker and slider to his tweaker GUI.

As far as I can tell, once the ColorizationColorInactive value is set, it is not updated automatically when the active window colour is changed (i.e. with the auto-colour determined by the wallpaper). I'm guessing that your Aero Glass routines are "run once" and therefore won't be able to keep track of those changes - so no automatic updating of the inactive borders without some sort of background process running constantly - but anything that makes it easier to get rid of the dull, grey borders would be good and the complimentary colour option would make that very easy for users.

Cheer - and thanks again (V0.5 is working well fo me so far)

Link to comment
Share on other sites

pengipete: this is how it works in Direct3D mode. Inactive caption color is set to the same value as the active caption color but the color balance is set to 12%. You can play with ColorizationColorBalanceInactive, ColorizationBlurBalanceInactive and ColorizationAfterglowBalanceInactive to achieve different color shades but if you don't touch ColorizationColorInactive directly than inactive caption color will always be derived from current active captions color. Also colorization settings (even for inactive captions) is automatically reloaded when you touch it in control panel (starting with v0.5). But as I said at the beginning - this works for Direct3D mode and I won't change it in Direct2D (just because I take D2D version as feature-frozen and I want to completely remove it when D3D mode works completely).

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Either I'm missing something or we're talking at cross-purposes. I'm talking about the borders of inactive window which are permanently pale grey - they don't change from that colour unless I use D2D and manually set ColorizationColorInactive in the registry. In D3D, they just remain grey no matter what.

Are you saying that the inactive windows borders should be automatically changing colour to "match" the active windows when I use Aero Glass in D3D - or are you saying that we need to alter registry values if we want anything other than pale grey - or are you saying that there is no way to have anything but that pale grey in D3D?

Sorry if that's confusing (it's cos I am confused :))

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Normally the inactive caption color is hardcoded to RGB 235,235,235. That's DWM "feature".

a) If GlassColorization is > 0 than alpha value of caption color is set to this value and blended into the blur effect. When GlassColorization is 0, then this color is completely ignored and nothing is blended into the blur effect. This is valid for both Direct2D and Direct3D. But I recommend to set this value to 0 in Direct3D mode, because this mode is almost native and should not use this kind of colorization (it is there for backward compatibility only and it will be removed in the future)

B) In Direct2D mode, when ColorizationColorInactive is set, then every try to render solid 235,235,235 is replaced by value of this registry settings.

c) In Direct3D mode, blur effect is rendered via DWM pixel shader which itself colorizes blur result with color in ColorizationColor multiplied by ColorizationColorBalance. However, for inactive captions, I've added a feature that it uses ColorizationColorInactive multiplied by ColorizationColorBalanceInactive instead. By default, ColorizationColorInactive has the same value as ColorizationColor but ColorizationColorBalanceInactive is set to 12% (it is approx. 80% for active captions) therefore the result color may look much more greyish. Anyway, don't forget about a).

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Sorry to be a pain but you lost me completely :blushing:

What is "GlassColorization" - is it a registry value cos if it is, I don't have it in my registry?

Without any technical detail on how it works, can you say whether or not it's possible to have inactive window borders set to a colour other than the default grey when using the D3D mode. I don't mind how it works - I just want to know if it's possible.

I'm really confused because you seem to be saying that the inactive border should already be "tinted" with the colour of the active borders when using Aero Glass in D3D but I am seeing absolutely no colouring - even tested that by dramatically changing border colours, taking screen grabs then checking the inactive border colours in photoshop - they are identical.

At the moment, if I use Aero Glass in the D3D mode, I can only have grey inactive borders - always and only exactly the same "dead man's skin" shade of grey and that doesn't change no matter what I do with the active window border colour. If I use the D2D setting in your app, I can have the inactive borders any colour I like - so it seems to me that using D3D is a step backwards - it may be technically more "better" but it seems that it lsoes a valuable feature. If you are planning on dropping the D2D method, it will make the app less useful for me as changing the inactive border colour is at least as important as having transparency.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I copied your registry settings exactly - and got completely transparent borders with no colour at all - and then I noticed that your window gadgets are not standard Windows 8 ones. Are you using a custom theme or gui - cos your settings simply don't work on my bog-standard W8.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Used theme does not influence it at all. It is just glyph which is placed over the blurred and colorized border. I just tried with default Win8 theme and no problem - the color is just bit more intensive.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Guest
This topic is now closed to further replies.
  • Recently Browsing   0 members

    • No registered users viewing this page.
×
×
  • Create New...