modulate RGB for layers

[Tanja]

Of course, another possibility is to make the transparent part of all your tiles be 25% opaque (alpha=64) with maybe some blue tint, instead of entirely transparent.

 :educated:
you knew it all before.
modulate rgb won't work how i need it to. i do it now like you suggested here, because the special effect with blue tinted tiles is, the farthest layers look flatter and sunken into the sky. it is a pity the beautiful sky layer will not be seen here, but the nice part of it was just very small. it is way better to solve it this way.

[Tanja]

i am glad.
this modulateRGB is a very good way to elegantly fade out the title screen.
one could also fade in and out the inventory at certain ingame places. only "drawCounterAsTile" seems to withstand. i tried it with a mapped tile which alpha correlates with the alpha counter.

i looked for a line in some tile.cs which does the same (modulateAlpha) as for the layerbase.cs, but found nothing.
if noone knows how to solve that, i will simply disable the "draw" rule.

[bluemonkmn]

In PlanBase.cs you will see the DrawCounterAsTile function, which has many occurrences of the following function call:
disp.Sprite.Draw
The last parameter to this function is the color modulation value, which is currently hard-coded as -1 (no modulation).  You could try replacing every -1 with fr[frameIndex].Color to use the modulation assigned to the frame, or provide your own color modulation value.  I made a note to check if this should be changed in the default code later (use the frame's modulation instead of ignoring it).  Seems like I forgot to use the modulation properly there.  Let me know if it behaves more like you would want/expect if you use "fr[frameIndex].Color" instead of "-1".

[Tanja]

i doesn't work at all...   

[bluemonkmn]

It works for me.  I first declared a variable:
int modulate = 0x7f808080;
Then I changed every Draw function's "-1" to "modulate" (all 6 of them):
Then the inventory was appearing dimmed and semi-transparent.  What did you do?

[Tanja]

i didn't make the change to all 6 occurences.
now, i've mastered to create that "int" at the right place. for your value it works.
so how i change overrideModulation = new ColorValue(255,255,255,Counter.AlphaMod2.CurrentValue).ToArgb();
to something like that: 0x7f808080 (i guess this is not Argb, but Ahex or so...)

and do i need to define ColorValue somewhere, are can just write overrideModulation = (255,255,255,Counter.AlphaMod2.CurrentValue).ToArgb();

[bluemonkmn]

ColorValue is the object that knows how to convert 4 byte values into an integer representing a color.  So if you want to create the color with 4 separate byte values, you need to use color value.  If you know the correct hex value to use, then you don't need to use ColorValue to convert it.  The ".ToArgb()" function just returns an integer, which you could hard-code yourself in hex.

Edit: There are other classes that can convert colors too:
int override = Color.FromArgb(8,9,10,11).ToArgb();
is equal to:
int override = 0x08090a0b;

[Tanja]

it works! the only thing is that Alpha is the first of the four values, not the last. 
so this is the final code line:
int overrideModulation = Color.FromArgb(Counter.AlphaMod2.CurrentValue,255,255,255).ToArgb();

thanks! finally this little piece works, too...

[durnurd]

it works! the only thing is that Alpha is the first of the four values, not the last. 

Argb == AlphaRedGrenBlue

[Tanja]

one should think so! but this is the code that modulates my layers:
if (this is Spiel_Map.inventory_bg_Lyr)
          {
             overrideModulation = new ColorValue(255,255,255,Counter.AlphaMod2.CurrentValue).ToArgb();
          }


and it works and modulates only the alpha! what do you say now?

[durnurd]

The ColorValue object is the DirectX representation of a color, which is constructed as RGBA, whereas a Color object is the .NET representation of a color, which is constructed as ARGB

[Tanja]

baaah.........   :educated: