[compiz] first entanglements with custom drop-shadows

[Mirco Müller]

Hi there again!

	I wanted to give a brief glimpse of the look of the new/customizable
drop-shadows for compiz. In contrast to my earlier post today I
currently follow the brute-force approach. 9 elements for the shadow...

	top-left
	top
	top-right
	left
	middle
	right
	bottom-left
	bottom
	bottom-right

	For the middle shadow-part there is a 2D-vector as parameter to allow
growing or shrinking of it in order to "simulate" non-orthogrphic
shadow-casting. Of course this is just faked, but still nice to have.

	Oh yeah, have a look at the supplied screen shot. The idea is to have a
set of 9 GL-textures (e.g. per window-type if this is desired) for all
windows. Parameters will be exposed via gconf for handy tweaking. Later
this could be done more nicely with a proper UI to hide the complexities
of all those tweakable parameters.

	With Mike "TD" Hearn and Thomas "tommie-lie" Liebetraut I chatted on
IRC a bit about other possible approaches to investigate, e.g. using
XShape to get the alpha-channel of a window and blur it with
fragment-shaders... there are several ways this could be attacked, each
having their advantages and disadvantages. A combination of multiple
approaches might be viable too, if we want to allow optimized or/and
fallback paths to actually do drop-shadows. But maybe we're also just
overdoing things :)

	Next thing is now to stuff this in gnome-window-decorator.c, have those
cairo-based drawing functions paint into GL-textures and use these
instead of the hard-coded inline-pixmaps. Once I have this working I
post a patch here for everybody to check out (and flame me ;).

Best regards...

MacSlow

-- 
email - macslow at bangang.de
www - http://macslow.thepimp.net
lowfat - http://macslow.thepimp.net/sponsor-it
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: shadow-example-use-1.png
Type: image/png
Size: 53524 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/compiz/attachments/20060402/a32d2e3b/shadow-example-use-1-0001.png