Floating boxes : graphical glitches when overlapping

[Splatsch]

I'm encountering an issue with the floating boxes if I move them too much close one from another. There is always an area around one box in which the other box it is overlapping is rendered invisible.
I made a screenshot to show things

I'm encountered some minor graphical glitches, while scrolling or when I try to look through menus. I prefer to put a link to these two here too because they're may be related.

[ralphtricky]

For the floating boxes, I'd suggest not doing that[:D] I felt it was better to allow overlap than to avoid overlap and make it more difficult to move things around. I've logged the scrolling issue. I may try something, but the 'best' graphical solution would make scrolling slower, and I'd rather not do that.

Believe it or not a 2D game has to be optimized, in different ways a 3D game since the CPU is doing most of the work, I did a lot of work to avoid redrawing, all the dialogs have a 'dirty flag' and when changed are drawn to a 'backbuffer' then the map is copied to another backbuffer and the dialog buffers are copied over top then the result is drawn to the screen. With 3D calls, I'd push everything to the videocard and let it sort everything out[8D]

[Splatsch]

ORIGINAL: ralphtricky

For the floating boxes, I'd suggest not doing that[:D] I felt it was better to allow overlap than to avoid overlap and make it more difficult to move things around. I've logged the scrolling issue. I may try something, but the 'best' graphical solution would make scrolling slower, and I'd rather not do that.

Believe it or not a 2D game has to be optimized, in different ways a 3D game since the CPU is doing most of the work, I did a lot of work to avoid redrawing, all the dialogs have a 'dirty flag' and when changed are drawn to a 'backbuffer' then the map is copied to another backbuffer and the dialog buffers are copied over top then the result is drawn to the screen. With 3D calls, I'd push everything to the videocard and let it sort everything out[8D]

Ahah [:D]
And you were right : enabling overlapping is a lot more handy/easy to use. I simply wasn't expecting this graphical result of transparency through boxes, and I wasn't sure it was... intended [;)]
Noooo !! Don't reduce the scrolling speed ! (which is nice even if sometimes a bit too fast) I prefer infinitely a small graphical glitch rather than a slow scrolling speed
I'll talk about this here but this applies too to the scrolling issue thread, isn't it possible to simply have the option to disable this "shadow area around boxes" ("Each of the dialogs has a 15 pixel clear border around it to allow for the shadow effect.") for people encountering graphical glitches ? This would resolve the issue of transparency here and the scrolling slow redraw/refresh one.

It seems really very complicated, and with all the existing pc configs, it must be a nightmare. But 3D seems in same time a nice improvement for performances in general.
It's always nice to hear devs saying they want to optimize their game, and to see them really supporting it ! [&o]

[Shadrach]

I've been playing a lot of Command Ops 2 over the years and it handles overlapping panels really well:
https://imgur.com/a/caKCi

There's a slight shadow to make the panel stand out, but I think it's a part of the graphics so it's probably not drawn on every repaint. I think it uses standard Windows controls, and you can even move the panels outside the current monitor, overlap them, and it remembers the position. Scrolling the map around them is smooth.

You can't resize them though, and one things the CmdOps engine sorely lacks is scaling for modern displays, all the panels are hard-coded in size to fit with the text boxes. Hence the slightly blurry look of my screenshot, since it uses System DPI scaling to even be able to read the text on 1440p displays.

[Splatsch]

ORIGINAL: Shadrach

I've been playing a lot of Command Ops 2 over the years and it handles overlapping panels really well:
https://imgur.com/a/caKCi

There's a slight shadow to make the panel stand out, but I think it's a part of the graphics so it's probably not drawn on every repaint. I think it uses standard Windows controls, and you can even move the panels outside the current monitor, overlap them, and it remembers the position. Scrolling the map around them is smooth.

You can't resize them though, and one things the CmdOps engine sorely lacks is scaling for modern displays, all the panels are hard-coded in size to fit with the text boxes. Hence the slightly blurry look of my screenshot, since it uses System DPI scaling to even be able to read the text on 1440p displays.

There is always good and bad sides for everything
All of this is very complicated, and I understand perfectly why there can be glitches ! Having an aesthetic, functional, and widely compatible & adaptable interface seems really hard to do. They've done already a really good work, and I hope they'll be able to fix & improve all of that without too much hassle.