PSX Flight Deck Visuals- Option request (not urgent)

[cavaricooper]

Hardy-

This topic has been discussed in the past, but could I please request consideration for another tick box under SCREEN which would be similar to the un-ticking of Windshield view active, but replace the windshield segment with an inactive TRANSPARENT field?

I am using PSX solo more and more, however, it would be splendid to just add the visuals without resorting losing the center pillar reference... which is invaluable in the last few moments of approach handling.

Thanks for reading, and HAPPY NEW YEAR!

Best- C

[Hardy Heinlin]

I would do it if I were able to. But neither Apple nor Microsoft allows developers to cut holes in a desktop frame canvas.

I'm sorry!


Cheers,

|-|ardy

[cavaricooper]

Hardy-

Tut mir nie leid, deine Arbeit bringt uns jeden Tag Wunder und Freude.

Ich werde immer dankbar sein.

Frohes neues Jahr!

C

[Jeroen Hoppenbrouwers]

I would do it if I were able to. But neither Apple nor Microsoft allows developers to cut holes in a desktop frame canvas.

Wait!

I have written stuff for Windows a few years ago that absolutely allowed me to make parts of a window transparent and even the mouse would reach through it and click on whatever was below, without raising it in Z-order. There was some pretty funky stuff going on, and I just selected the transparent colour.

It may be that this does not work for a canvas, so it won't help PSX, but for example the general background you glue controls to when designing a window definitely can be made transparent.


Hoppie

[Dirk Schepmann]

Hi Carl,

Not exactly what you want, but a good compromise is to make an overlay of the P3D outside view on the windscreen of PSX.

I resize the P3D view so that it is approximately as big as the outside view in the old PS1 and place it in the upper left corner (do you remember the old layout?).

There are 2 freeware tools which you also need:
- Always on Top
- Borderless gaming (both can be easily found by Dr. Google)

The always on top tool helps to keep the P3D window visible even if PSX is your active frame. And the Borderless Tool removes the edges and the title bar from the P3D mini window so that you have visuals only.

Of course you can resize it to your needs. I prefer to have the PSX runway visible (as I use this as primary orientation in the approach) but it's nice to use the small outside view for taxi or vacating the runway.

The small outside view requires only little CPU power, so it's easy to run PSX and P3D on one single machine.

Best regards,
Dirk

[cavaricooper]

Dirk-

Thanks, I will have a go with that... I might just be able to overlay in the right spot leaving the pillar intact. I have been flying PAX more and more as a stand-alone, but I do miss the taxi bits and ATC/miving map solutions.

Happy New Year- C

PS- I do remember PS-1 fondly, but love PSX even more:)

[Hardy Heinlin]

Hoppie, there might be a trick, but don't forget that PSX is a frame rate sensitive animation program aiming at 72 fps, and for this purpose it uses hardware acceleration for one big rectangle area in "volatile image" memory. Even if such a cutout could be achieved by a bitmask, I doubt that the performance would exceed 5 fps.

To get a rectangle cutout one could also start two PSX instances; one for the overhead panel at the top of the monitor and one for the main panel at the bottom. A third PSX instance may set the center post.


|-|ardy

[Jeroen Hoppenbrouwers]

Hardy,

It may indeed be that performance suffers, but we're not talking alpha blending. Just pure switching 0%-100%. It will all depend on the capability of the HW/SW combo to put a rectangle inside a rectangle or something. I agree it isn't trivial and will open a can of worms, and likely only will work on specific combos.


Hoppie

Edit
I looked up code I wrote in 2011 to make interesting effects on Windows (only) when implementing an ATC add-on that should live on one of those radar scope programs for VATSIM. Transparency was a good feature, so I could make "glass window objects" that you can place on your scope and that show yellow lettering on a transparent background so you can still see your scope, too.

Windows has a feature that you can tell a window frame which of its colours (name it) actually should turn transparent. I only had to tell the system that "black" becomes transparent and hey, presto. Another feature then allowed me to vary the transparency between 0% and 100% but we know that alpha blending is expensive. There was a clear difference between 100% and less than 100%.

I have no idea whether Java allows access to these features because they also must be available in other environments then, but who knows.

[cavaricooper]

To get a rectangle cutout one could also start two PSX instances; one for the overhead panel at the top of the monitor and one for the main panel at the bottom. A third PSX instance may set the center post.

Interesting... if one instance only showed the pillar it would not cost much in CPU use....

FWIW, my sim runs on Windows, if there is any movement towards exploration.  I am hopelessly inept in this arena and fully understand if the time involved is not available at the moment... perhaps sometime in the future technology will allow this easier...

Best- C

[Hardy Heinlin]

I only had to tell the system that "black" becomes transparent

That sounds like an additional problem: It sounds like you used an indexed 255-colors system (like in GIF or PNG files). PSX uses a non-indexed 16 million color system plus alpha layers, i.e. over 4 billion color values in R/G/B/Alpha. There is no  index and thus I can't assign transparency to any index.


|-|ardy

[Jeroen Hoppenbrouwers]

No, there was no index colour system, but there was a translation table from "colour name" to (R, G, B) values. There still was exactly one (R, G, B) tuple that you could declare to be the transparent colour.

I looked more closely now and there are actually two separate mechanisms.

1. Exactly one colour can be made totally transparent (colourless) which is very cheap, performance-wise.
2. Any other colour actually is (R, G, B, alpha) where each alpha less than opaque is expensive.

The totally transparent colour is only relevant if it is a background colour for a window. It has the nice side effect that a mouse "reaches right through it" so there really is nothing there, the window does not exist. You can make a picture frame without picture, put it up, and still reach the wall through it.

Hoppie

[Hardy Heinlin]

Was that a "splash" window type (the ones that are usually displayed during the start of a program)?

[Jeroen Hoppenbrouwers]

No; active data window during normal ops. I like to build stuff with many windows instead of one large window that people typically put full screen to get space. This ATC client used about four windows that you could scatter over the desktop (scope in full screen) where you wanted them. All windows were individual toplevels. Most people used them without window background (i.e. background fully transparent) and as stay-on-top.

Think: word processor with the white paper having made transparent.

I found the web page back:
http://www.hoppie.nl/acars/prg/atc/
Look under "Individual Window Configuration".
Stupidly no relevant screen shots.

Edit
I just reinstalled the thing and made a new screen shot. Yes it is completely spraining your eyes.




Hoppie

[cagarini]

Sometime ago someone tried this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lrqwwsv4ey4

[cavaricooper]

Jose-

I was involved in the testing of that product.  Unfortunately, it never fully materialized due to technical issues.... the YT video does illustrate what MIGHT be possible one day.  Hoppie's prior post is the most promising thing I have seen yet....

C

[cavaricooper]

Hoppie-

I happen to be on my Mac atm, but I have moved the Layout to approximate what I see when using PSX standalone on my PC. I end up with a black rectangle on the left as I subscribe to Hardy's advice of having the PFD/ND centered in view.  Would the window you illustrate be tailorable to the edges of the cockpit frame, or must it be a rectangle?



Ta!

C

[cagarini]

Whatever this may lead to, and it's always going to be great for those who feel fine with FSX / P3D or XP for external visuals display, my "Ideal" would be to have someone creating a "Earth" for PSX, with very basic graphics, orography and cities depicted as simple as, for instance, in ELITE GenView or  Airlinetools A32x, but with a good representation of runways and taxiways and their real lighting systems.

[Jeroen Hoppenbrouwers]

This particular technology, from the Windows XP era, could do a few things:

1. You pick a colour and the system then turns that colour into glass (for one window).
2. You can set the transparency of whole or part of a window to X% (this alpha blending is expensive, remember Aqua).
3. You can remove the unpainted window background, which has a side effect that you can reach through it, too.

The window in the example above had a removed background. Window frames are rectangles so this probably won't work for the PSX windshield. It all depends on how PSX constructs its graphic layers. If it would be possible to suppress all windshield painting and this would reveal a (grey?) canvas background, which is painted over everywhere else in the PSX window, we may have a chance.


Hoppie

[Hardy Heinlin]

Carl, to make the black rectangle on the left-hand side transparent, why don't you just move the flight deck frame to the right? Or to fill it with any flight deck area, why don't you just fill it with any flight deck area? The black rectangle on the left-hand side needs no hole as it is not surrounded by flight deck stuff. Or am I misunderstanding something?

Also, I think it makes no sense to place the PFD in the monitor center as long as the runway view is off-center. What I always mean by "centered PFD" is to have both the runway and the PFD on the same vertical axis like on the real flight deck. You can place your chair anywhere in front of the monitor -- left, center, right. It just needs to be on the same vertical line as the runway and the PFD.

RWY
  |
PFD
  |
Chair



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[Hardy Heinlin]

Hoppie, it's getting interesting :-)

I just put an R/G/B/alpha of "150, 0, 0, 50" on several sandwich panels on the Instructor canvas, and this is what the iMac displays:





So it seems to work -- at least on the Instructor frame. Will do some further experiments ...


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