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Windows 10 DEVELOPMENT


bigmuscle

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Hey Big Muscle,

 

I've just been tidying up my theme atlas file a little, and I noticed a small glitch that isn't from the atlas.  It might be in your code, I'm not sure...

 

As you can see, I have the FrameMargin setting to 2, yet I'm getting a different number of pixels blurred in active windows vs. inactive windows...

 

FrameMarginError.png

 

That theme atlas is:  http://Noel.ProDigitalSoftware.com/ForumPosts/Win10/10162/RoundedCornersBlueActive.png

 

-Noel

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It does not seem to be related to FrameMargin but rather to used atlas file which is "incompatible" with current version of DWM. It probably makes inactive frames geometry one pixel smaller and it must be taken into account in atlas image.

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Just installed Windows 10 10162. God how I miss Aeroglass on this. If I were to download the 1.3.1 aeroglass and install it exactly how I installed it on windows 8.1 would it work? Or are people having to jump threw hoops to get it to work in windows 10?

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Enigma96, there's a test version of Aero Glass for Windows 10130 and newer.  It doesn't work perfectly with build 10162, but passably well as you can see from my screen grabs above.

 

Big Muscle, perhaps what you were saying is that Microsoft made a mistake in DWM.  Even with the stock theme atlas that comes with Win 10 only two pixels are blurred on inactive windows.  In any case, I'll try to work around it as best I can.

 

-Noel

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It's not "turnkey", no - to run Aero Glass with Win 10 you still need to be prepared to get down and dirty with the tech. 

 

It's possible that with the right tools assembled in the right folder, you can (mostly) just use the Aero Glass GUI tool, but you need to get just the right versions of the tools from the right places, understand how the Aero Glass tool works, and use the right combinations of settings.  I'd be lying if I said I haven't done registry editing to get it all to function.

 

Honestly, running Win 10 / anything is probably not yet a "turnkey" proposition at this point.

 

-Noel

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Enigma96, there's a test version of Aero Glass for Windows 10130 and newer.  It doesn't work perfectly with build 10162, but passably well as you can see from my screen grabs above.

 

Big Muscle, perhaps what you were saying is that Microsoft made a mistake in DWM.  Even with the stock theme atlas that comes with Win 10 only two pixels are blurred on inactive windows.  In any case, I'll try to work around it as best I can.

 

-Noel

 

I don't know if it is mistake or intention. I will surely check it, because I noticed more different things on inactive windows - e.g. different color shade is used on left and right part of the frame.

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Different parts of the atlas shades the different parts of the borders.  I don't think my theme atlas gives different shading on different sides, though.  Of course the offset in the drop shadow is intentional.

 

ThemeAtlasCloseup.png

 

I was doing some additional experimentation and found that while I could control the opacity that third pixel out from the left edge of the client area, the drop shadow resource is still composited starting at the 4th pixel, so there's no compensation in the theme atlas that I can come up with other than to maybe make that one column of pixels a little more opaque to partially hide the problem. 

 

I suspect Microsoft just made a mistake in the implementation.  I can't see much utility in making active vs. inactive windows different sized by one pixel on each side.  It does kind of say that their whole "borderless" concept is pretty much a hack job.

 

Unfortunately Microsoft might not be interested in correcting any of this, since with (nearly) borderless windows it makes little difference.  You might ultimately want to try to work around it.  With FrameMargin 2 it's not very noticeable, especially on a dark background.

 

-Noel

 

 

P.S., After working to try to perfect this theme atlas, I happened to notice how imperfect the old Win 7 theme is.  Pixel perfection has always apparently been a hard thing to achieve.

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OK thanks for the info Noel :-) I think I will wait until their is a simple .exe for us noobs :-) I really do miss the aero effect though it makes a world of difference in appearance. Thanks to everyone that has made this wonderful program possible cheers!

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Noel: I checked the default atlas and your atlas for FrameMargin = 10.

 

In both cases, there is blur of 10 pixels in width.

Then, with default atlas, it continues with 1px semi-transparent color followed by several pixels of shadow. With your atlas, there is 3px semi-transparent border and then the shadow.

 

So it looks like the default atlas does not contain shadow at the correct place but rather in the area where you have that 3px border.

There is also abnormality, that active frame has blur of 11 pixels in width (1px more) which makes this problem with your atlas (and also other atlases...).

Quick solution: offset the side borders by one pixel and add 1px of shadow to the edge. Is this possible?

 

EDIT: yes, I found it. It's not in 10130 but it is in 10162 - for inactive frame, the geometry is cut by 1 pixel (or logical pixel size if your DPI is not 96).

 

---

About the inactive frame coloring, it seems that there is another Microsoft try to add more hardcoded values. Up to now, inactive frames were drawn with opacity specified in theme file. Build 10162 has this value hardcoded to 0.4. However, it is not hardcoded on all places, thus I see two different color shades on inactive frame (and it is visible with your atlas too).

Edited by bigmuscle
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Nice thought, but unfortunately no, not possible to compensate.  If I move the side borders/shadows inward by 1 pixel the semi-transparent area remains but I lose the light colored edges I've added for definition on a dark background.  Microsoft is compositing the solid edge resources there, but the blur simply isn't extending out the whole way.

 

EdgesMovedIn.png

 

Here's a comparative screen grab with the edges in the normal positions...

 

EdgesInNormalSpot.png

 

Since you found the code that shortens the space on an inactive window, can you change it on the fly to render the proper size?

 

If this is the worst thing we have to live with when Win 10 releases, it'll probably be possible to ignore, at least for folks like me who prefer small frame margin values.

 

-Noel

 

 

P.S., since the problem is with the blur, and not the composited resource for the edge, there is no problem visible if the edge resources are made fully opaque.

Edited by NoelC
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That will be easy to ignore, but the intermittent crashes of dwm.exe are difficult to ignore.

 

What are you doing when you see crashes?  I ask because I'm not seeing any - though to be fair I'm not doing that much with Windows 10 at the moment.  Have you provided debug logs and mini-dumps to Big Muscle?

 

Perhaps it's time for me to do another immersive test, where I make the VM full-screen across all my monitors and use it for my daily work for a while.

 

Regarding reporting inconsistency in rendering window borders with a hacked-in Aero Glass tool to Microsoft...  LOL  They'd rejoice that they're causing Big Muscle trouble.

 

-Noel

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