[compiz] Greetings, first remarks about trying to do customizable drop-shadows

[Mirco Müller]

Am Montag, den 03.04.2006, 19:54 +0200 schrieb David Reveman:
 
> > 	So right now I want to have a single set of 9 small textures with the
> > different drop-shadow-parts that gets generated at start-time of compiz
> > (or whenever gnome-window-decorator initially runs its setup functions),
> > according to some tweakable parameters set via gconf by the user... or
> > maybe later by one of the recently emerging graphical
> > compiz-configuration-frontends.
> 
> You definitely don't want 9 small textures for this. You can easily do
> it with one small texture that just contains a quarter of a circle by
> assigning texture coordinates correctly. However, this is not what we
> want. I've done this, trust me :) 

	You're right, it is doable with only one texture (that mentioned quarter
part of a radial-gradient filled circle) and some uv-coord-magic. BTW, I don't
think it's that nasty... this uv-coord thing... just a little bit :) Using only
this one texture makes it very texture-memory efficient. The different uv-coords
together with the nine cases for each shadow part (tl, t, tr, l, m, r, bl, b, br)
can be assembled in a display-lists to drive the efficiency up a notch more.

> Shadows as part of the decorations is most efficient. It only makes
> sense to do static shadows on rectangular windows and windows with
> decorations. We can't do usable shadows on ARGB windows and it's not
> worth doing any shadows on windows that use the shape extension.

Agreed.

>  ARGB
> windows should do their own shadows and that's why I suggested a
> drop-shadow library and some root window properties to keep the shadow
> look consistent among applications.

	Still I'll do the tweakable drop-shadow stuff in g-w-d as a start. I
want this for the common case (decorated rectangular windows) now :)
Then we have -  at least for this case - reusable code which can be
stuffed in a drop-shadow-library at a later point in time. Aside from
that, I just don't like the super thin drop-shadows compiz provides at
the moment. Sorry, David...  but that's just me ;-)

Best regards...

Mirco "MacSlow" Müller

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