color depth info

[dallasfreak2]

If you're trying to make a menu that looks good on all color depths, here's one way you can do it.
Design different looks based on 16, 256, and 16bit/32bit color schemes using graphics. Overlay each one on top of each other. On menu intialize, have autoplay get current depth, hide all graphics, and using and if/then statement, show the graphics for the individual color schemes. That way regardless of what color depth the enduser has, your menu will still look good.

autoplay detects the color depth as follows
32 bit color -- 32
16 bit color -- 16
256 colors -- 8
16 colors -- 4

You can also use this method to make your menu "skinable" -- instead of looking for color depth - -read a registry entry and apply those graphics .. use ful for web browsers, mp3 players etc.

[Worm]

Good idea!

To add to it, you could end all of the graphics you make with the color depth like so:

background32.png

That way you could use the color depth returned by AMS to hide and show the correct graohics by substituting the color depth with the variable, like so:

background%ColorDepth%.png

[Corey]

Yes, this would be particularly excellent for installation and/or driver disks because you never know what color depth they're at in these instances, i.e. a CD which installs your video driver is likely to be used at the very minimum color depth since you would probably have no video driver installed at that point, etc.

Good idea.

Corey Milner
Creative Director, Indigo Rose Software (http://www.indigorose.com)

[dallasfreak2]

Good thought worm, but one thing on autoplay4. It automaticaaly renames the files to Menu13.lah or whatever. So using background%colordepth%.bmp wont work once compiled. Maybe if there were an option to turnoff the autorenaming feature or even the ability to say use this for 16 colors, this for 256 colors, or this for 16 bit colors would work. Maybe that could become part of, or at least an addon module, for Autoplay 5.


My bad -- External reference will work....er nevermind no it doesn't

Still i think the color depth choices would be a cool feature on both graphics and text.

Question of Autoplay 5 -- I assume with the new scripting language that it will support double variables - right? Suchas:

%dog%==poodle
%%dog%% would hten create a variable called %poodle%

{useful in while loops when retrieving data from an array, or delimmented string} -- hard to show an example without a large amount of code

Also it would be nice to use variable names in paths to graphics and other things so that things like %CDROM%\%OSType%\Directx\setup.exe would work.

[Worm]

I beg to differ. I have used that exact technique hundreds of times to show/hide objects.

Once you bring the object into AMS, you can name it whatever you want. The scripting engine in AMS refers to it as whatever you name it, not the filename.

Say I insert an image object, I then name it imgMenu32.

To hide and show that particular image, I can do this:

imgMenu%ColorDepth%

As long as %ColorDepth%=32, it'll hide the object.

[JimS]

I haven't used AMS5 yet, but you can use variable names in paths in AMS4, just like in your example.

[Colin]

There are definitely major improvements in AutoPlay Media Studio 5.0 regarding color depth and automatic on-the-fly color quantization.

Quite incredible stuff really - the mapping of 32-bit alpha channel information into an 8 bit color space *as required* was an amazing feat. With v5.0 your screen is assembled in full 32 bit glory and then adjusted as needed to display optimally on any monitor/graphics card.

It basically means that you can do whatever you want and not worry about 256 color systems getting a sub-par presentation. Not to mention the fact that non true-color systems are only a small percentage of systems nowadays - but to show that we're commited to making you look good no matter how old your customer/client's system is!

[dallasfreak2]

ok worm -- i thought u meant in the browse box when you browse to the image to include -- sorry for the misunderstanding there -- hiding the objects works well to. i wonder though in speed terms, would it not be wuicker to make an 16 color page, 256 colr, 16 bit color and do page jumps to pagename%colorDepth% in stead of hiding and showing objects. If only a few objects no big deal, but if u have 25-50 images, and using 3 differnet color systems woudl result in hiding 50-100 images per page. sure the multiple pages would make the project bigger, but i doubt it would be much a difference

and the path to graphics though, can not include variables currently.

[Worm]

Definately!

I don't know about you, but when I have to manage too many object on a page it gets a bit difficult.