In article <012501c745b2$5ae809c0$0301a8c0@Production>, "Paul" <pdeleeuw@deleeuw.com.au> writes:
I'm not sure that it is all that difficult.
1. True colour: [...]
Yes, I know what you mean by your implementation, but fractint has a lot of stuff that wants to treat the computed image as a set of color indices. All uses of the read routines will have to be code reviewed.
I'm not sure what these "layers" are.
Have you used photoshop or gimp (a freeware/opensource photoshop clone)? They have the ability for you to create image layers and the order in the layer stack defines how they are composited to create a final image. Think of it as sheets of acetate all stacked on top of each other with partial transparency per pixel in the layers allowing you to see through the layers on top to see the layers underneath.
2. Colour modification (requires GUI)
This would also require a change to the parameter handling code, the image read/write code and the batch generation code. That is, assuming that you want to persist the 6 parameters for the colormap instead of just the 256 entry table.
7. Clipboard support
Edit -> copy or control C and the clipboard contains the image being displayed
Right now, we have no menu... introducing one (and other Win32-isms) is somewhat problematic because of the hacky message loop code that's there right now. This is why some things will be easier once the UI code is separated from the engine and a native Win32 UI is in place. Remember, right now its still a DOS app in architecture.
9. Use of WM_COPYDATA message
This is a piece of cake to implement. The message passes a pointer to a slab of RAM and the size of the data being sent.
Again, this is IPC Win16 style. You can't pass pointers between Win32 applications and expect them to work -- the two processes don't share the same address space. Instead, you use COM or some other IPC mechanism. That is, unless I'm missing something about what you're saying. -- "The Direct3D Graphics Pipeline" -- DirectX 9 draft available for download <http://www.xmission.com/~legalize/book/download/index.html> Legalize Adulthood! <http://blogs.xmission.com/legalize/>