amiga-news.de - Holly Lights: Xmas decoration for Workbench 1.3

17.Dec.2021
AmigaLove

Holly Lights: Xmas decoration for Workbench 1.3
For those who already want to give their Workbench 1.3 some Christmas glamour, Chris 'Crispy' Brenner has written a small program that conjures up a Christmas fairy lights on the screen:

Regarding how it works, the author states the following:
"When HollyLights first starts, it looks at the depth of the Workbench screen. It will then add the required number of bitplanes needed to bring the Workbench screen up to sixteen colors. It does this in such a way that is invisible to the Workbench program, so Workbench thinks it's still operating with the same number of colors it had before the program was run. This scheme has the benefit of allowing Workbench to operate faster than if it was truly in sixteen colors, but has a couple of drawbacks as well.

When the program initialization is done, and all of the graphics data is in place, then the holly and lights decorations are rendered into the main Workbench window once every couple of seconds. Rendering is suspended when the Workbench screen is not the frontmost screen.

If HollyLights was started from a four color Workbench, then the window will be decorated with lights of four different colors: red, green, orange, and blue. If started from an eight color Workbench, then only red and green lights will be shown. This is done so as to not interfere with the eight color palette."

And on the undesirable side effects, he writes the following:
"Since Workbench doesn't know about the extra bitplanes, it will not refresh any of the graphics in those bitplanes. Those extra bitplanes are refreshed by the HollyLights program when it renders its graphics once every couple of seconds, and because of this you will briefly see some leftover graphics in a window when you move it on top of any of the HollyLights decorations. This is normal.

Unfortunately, I haven't found a system friendly way to refresh the Workbench menus, so there will always be leftover graphics in the sections of the menus that intersect with the HollyLights decorations."

On weekend a version for AmigaOS 2 should also follow. (dr)

[News message: 17. Dec. 2021, 09:30] [Comments: 0]
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