I'm currently adapting my personal engine to Vulkan and I want to reimplement transparent windows, which I already had with OpenGL.
I thought that all I need to do is to select the correct color format ( with alpha channel ) and to set the compositeAlpha property of VkSwapchainCreateInfoKHRto VK_COMPOSITE_ALPHA_POST_MULTIPLIED_BIT_KHR.
However clearing the window with a full transparent color doesn't provide the expected results. It's fully opaque.
Of course my window system, which didn't change since I had OpenGL, supports it and when I just disable the rendering I also can't click through at the supposed position of the window, this tells me that it's there.
Are there any other required changes to make this work?
Some infos
The image format is VK_FORMAT_B8G8R8A8_UNORM and I oriented the vulkan setup as found in Sascha Willems examples.
That capability (as most others) have to be queried before usage about whether it is supported. Otherwise it is invalid to use it.
This particular feature is queried by vkGetPhysicalDeviceSurfaceCapabilitiesKHR as pSurfaceCapabilities->supportedCompositeAlpha. It is a bitfield/flag-set, so more than one mode or none can be supported.
I think the result/feature support may be influenced by the VkSurface. That is, how the platform window was created. Or maybe the driver maker simply did not implement it yet (despite that feature being supportable).
Since it worked for you before in OGL, the later is more likely. But couldn't hurt to play with the platform window creation parameters...
Dunno if this is still relevant, but I got it working with transparent windows through GLFW. (If you are not using GLFW you may dismiss this answer!)
As stated here, there are two ways of obtaining window transparency: framebuffer transparency (alpha bit), and window transparency.
For window transparency it is sufficient to call glfwSetWindowOpacicity(GLFWwindow*, float), where the opacity value should be in the range (0, 1].
NOTE: Since GLFW does not support using both transparency methods at the same time, we must still use VK_COMPOSITE_ALPHA_OPAQUE_BIT_KHR in the compositeAlpha field of the VkSwapchainCreateInfoKHR object.
Window transparency may not be supported on all systems, which is why GLFW provides us with a function glfwGetWindowOpacity(GLFWwindow*), to check if calling the first methods was successful.
Related
I am stuck writing a Vulkan renderer. The final output I see on the screen is only the clear color, animated over time, but no geometries. Even with all possible validation turned on I dont get any errors / warnings / bestPractices / performance hints etc except for the bestPractices warning "You are using VK_PIPELINE_STAGE_ALL_COMMANDS_BIT when vkQueueSubmit is called". Not actually sure I use all possible validation, but I have Vulkan Configuration running and ticked all checkboxes under "VK_LAYER_KHRONOS_validation", after which the vkQueueSubmit hint showed up
After poking around for some hours I decided to look into using RenderDoc and I can startup the application just fine, however RenderDoc says "Connection status: Established, Api: none" and I cannot capture a frame.
Quite confused I thought I would look into using NSight Graphics just to find the same problem: I can run the application but it says "Attachable process detected. Status: No Graphics API". I read somewhere I can start the process first, then use the attach functionality to attach to the running process, which I did, unfortunately with the same outcome
I read there can be problems when not properly presenting every frame, which was the reason for me to change the clear color over time to make sure I actually present every frame, which I can confirm is the case
I am quite lost at this point, did anyone make similar experiences? Any ideas as to what I could do to get RenderDoc / NSight Graphics working properly? They both dont show anything in the logs as I guess they just assume the process does not use any graphics api and thus wont be traced.
I am also thankful for ideas about why I cannot see my geometries but I understand this is even harder to guess from your side, still some notes: I have even forced depth and stencil tests off, although the vertices should be COUNTER_CLOCKWISE I have also checked CLOCKWISE just to make sure, set the face cull mode off, checked the color write mask and rasterizerDiscard, even set the gl_Position to ignore the vertex positions and transform matrices completely and use some random values in range -1 to 1 instead, basically everything that came to my mind when I hear "only clear color, but no errors" but everything to no avail
In case it helps with anything: I am on Win11 using either RTX3070 or Intel UHD 770 both with the same outcome
Small Update:
Using the Vulkan Configurator I could force the VK_LAYER_RENDERDOC_capture layer on, after which when running the application I can see the overlay and after pressing F12 read that it captured a frame. However RenderDoc still cannot find a graphics api for this process and I have no idea how to access that capture
I then forced VK_LAYER_LUNARG_api_dump on and dumped it into an html which I inspected and I still cannot see anything wrong. I looked especially closely at the Pipeline and Renderpass creation calls.
This left me thinking it would be any uniform / vertex buffer content / offsets or whatever so I removed any of that, use hardcoded vertex positions and fragment outputs and still I can only see the clear color in the final image on the screen.
Thanks
Maybe confused me should start converting the relative viewport that I expose to absolute values using my current cameras width and height, ie giving (0,0,1920,1080) to Vulkan instead of (0,0,1,1).
Holymoly what a ride
I am using FireBreath to create a cross browser plugin which makes use of some native libraries for the respective platform (some .NET based DLLs for Windows and Objective-C based dylibs/frameworks for Mac). Native libraries display UI screens. In order to improve usability, if the user has a multi/extended monitor setup, i would like the native UIs to appear on the same screen as the browser window is currently on.
If an identifier to the monitor with the browser window can be retrieved, that can be passed down to the native components which can be configured to display their UIs on that monitor. I have used FireBreath's getWindowPosition() method to get the rect coordinates of the plugin and used that info to identify the correct monitor in the Windows platform.
However, the coordinates returned in Mac seems to be always 0 (or 1) irrespective of monitor on which the browser window currently resides. I understand that we have to configure an event model and a drawing model in order for this to work in Mac. I have tried following event/drawing model combinations without much success.
1) Cocoa/CoreGraphics
2) Carbon/CoreGraphics
Any help in this regard is much appreciated. Also please do share if there are other approaches to achieve the same. What i want to achieve is to identify the monitor on which the current active browser window resides in Mac. I am unsure at this point, but it maybe possible to achieve this at Objective-C level (without any changes at FireBreath level). Also please note that i want to support Safari, Firefox and Chrome browsers.
You won't like this answer, but simply put you can't do that on Mac. The problem is that with CoreGraphics you are only given a CGContextRef to work with, and it doesn't know where it will be drawn. It was technically possible in older browsers to get an NSWindow by exploiting some internal implementation details, but many browsers that's no longer possible and it was never supported.
Other drawing models are the same; CoreAnimation you have a CALayer but it doesn't know which screen or monitor it is drawn to. I personally think it's a bit annoying as well, but I do not know of any way to find out which monitor your plugin is rendered to, particularly since most of them actually copy the buffer to something else and render in a different process.
I did manage to come up with a workaround and i am just replying here for the completeness of the thread. As #taxilian explained, it is not possible to retrieve plugin coordinates using the window reference. As an alternative approach, Javascript 'Window' object has 2 properties called 'screenX' and 'screenY' that return X and Y coordinates of the browser window relative to the screen. If the user has an extended monitor setup, these are the absolute coordinates with respect to the full extended screen. We can use these values to determine the monitor with the browser window (if the X coordinate is outside the bounds of the primary monitor's width, then the browser should essentially be on the extended monitor). We can retrieve DOM properties from Firebreath as explained in the following link:
http://www.firebreath.org/display/documentation/Invoking+methods+on+the+DOM
I want to create controls that lets the user decide crop area of a bitmap, in the common way, having four corners on the image. I saw that there is a sample C# app in the Microsoft site for this - http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/showcase/details.aspx?uuid=bef08d57-fa4d-4d9c-9080-6ee55b8623c0
But I cannot figure out how to do this strictly WinJS. Do I need to create custom controls - if so how? Any sample code will help a great deal.
I have an example in my codeSHOW project. It's the demo called Rx Crop. It uses Reactive Extensions (which are awesome by the way), but if you didn't want that dependency you could probably just use the example to figure out how to do it without.
BTW, the codeSHOW project has a bug and a usability issue currently. I have an update in certification. For now, just make sure you select the Rx Crop demo on the home screen and then click See the Code. If you hit See the Code with no demo selected it will crash.
Do me a favor and rate the app. Thanks.
I recently started writing LINQPad data context drivers for accessing various types of systems. Unfortunately every driver I write, uses the same "cog wheel" icon. This makes it harder to discern their type than if they'd have a type-specific icon.
Is there a way to provide a custom icon for a driver?
Joe wasn't kidding in his comment. The release notes for LINQPad Beta version 4.42.10 contain this:
You can now specify a custom icon when writing Data Context drivers. Just include two files in your .lpx package: Connection.png and FailedConnection.png (the latter is applied if a data context is unable to load).
What the release notes don't mention (but is obvious once you check the existing icons) is that the icons needs to be 16x16 pixels.
My application makes use of an NSStatusItem. I need to grab the screen coordinates for the status item, but since I have no need for the functionality offered by setting a custom view for the item I am using a standard icon-based one instead.
Is there a way to get the status item's position without having to resort to setting a custom view to it?
Unless you find a better way, you could use some undocumented API: - (id)_window of NSStatusItem probably returns the window enclosing the item itself. Maybe you can get some interesting information out of that?
Beware: Some fundamentalists might actually try to break your neck for using undocumented API. Just make sure you check regularly if this portion of your code works with newer OS versions (either by hand or using some unit tests).