Stroke and Fill Shapes in Cocos2dx - opengl

I am looking for a feature in Cocos2dx that is readily available in a couple presentation frameworks I have used.
Stroke and Fill Brushes
Rich shape rendering allows one to specify a shape (ellipse, rectangle, custom polygon, custom shape with curves, etc.), a location, a size, a stroke brush and a fill brush then render.
Below is an example of the feature. In this case the shape is a star with a variety of brushes.
Brush Varieties for Shape
I have searched for such functionality in Cocos2dx but the closest I could find is polygon rendering with a solid color stroke and fill. I used it and it worked well but is not the "smart brush" I am looking for.
Brush Animation
Second feature I am looking for is the ability to animate the brushes. In this example, the fill brush starts off green then either instantly changes to or animates to yellow. This is done by altering properties of the shape, not recreating.
Brush Animation Example
Is this possible in Cocos2dx? If not, could you provide suggestions about how I might code this?

I think CCSprite/CCLayerColor/CCLayerGradient with CCClippingNode can simulate the "smart brush", and tintTo/tintBy action of CCSprite/CCLayerColor can change color without destroying the object

Related

Draw semi transparent shadow around Window

I'm trying to do something like what Auslogics Disk Defrag does with its custom window:
As can be seen, the blurred semi transparent shadow surrounding the window is much darker than the standard one, so the program must be drawing it by itself. The problem is, I can't find a way to paint anything transparent around a window.
In an answer to a similiar question, someone suggested creating a slightly bigger transparent window (using WS_EX_LAYERED + SetLayeredWindowAttributes()) behind the actual application window, and then do the translucent drawing on the transparent one. Not only does it sound like an ugly hack, it doesn't actually work. If, for example, one tries to draw a semi transparent black rectangle on a transparent window via GDI+, alpha blending is applied to the shape's color over the window background color (which would also be the transparency color) and then the shape is drawn with the calculated color, which obviously is not the window transparency, resulting in an opaque rectangle.
The semi transparent shadow is actually done by Gaussian Blur of the black square.
You can use this effect to create glows and drop shadows and use the
composite effect to apply the result to the original image. It is
useful in photo processing for filters like highlights and shadows.
You can use the output of this effect for input into lighting effects,
like the Specular Lighting or Diffuse Lighting effects, because the
alpha channel is blurred, too and lighting effects use the alpha
channel to determine surface geometry as a height map.
This effect is used by the built-in Shadow effect.
Refer: Gaussian blur effect
Then remove the standard frame, the entire window is your client area, so you can draw shadow in the extended frame.
Refer: Drawing in the Extended Frame Window
I think I've found a solution that works for me. I was hoping I wouldn't have to create an extra window just for the shadow, but every method I could find or think of would require me to draw all the controls by myself and/or somehow correct their alpha values.
So, I'm using a layered window with per pixel alpha. I paint over it with Direct2D, or, alternatively, I use some PNGs with transparency for the edges and corners of the shadow and copy them on a memory DC. Either way I simply recreate the shadow with the right dimensions when the window is resized, and call UpdateLayeredWindowIndirect. Both methods seem to be working well on Windows 7 and 10, and so far I haven't found any glitches.
Preventing it from showing on the taskbar was a bit tricky. All the ways I know have drawbacks. What worked best for me was making the layered window owned by the main one. At least that way it will only be visible on the desktop where the program is actually running, unlike other alternatives which would force it to show on every virtual desktop. Finally, because I disable that window, I interact with it by processing WM_SETCURSOR.

Drawing text with shadow on pixmap with QPainter

I am working on a project in C++ with Qt, and I am trying to find a way to apply a text shadow when drawing text on a QPixmap using QPainter.
I understand that QGraphicsDropShadowEffect is a thing, and I am using in other parts of my project, but I can't for the life of me find a way to apply a QGraphicsEffect when drawing with QPainter on a pixmap. Drawing the same text multiple times with different offsets and opacities doesn't quite cut it.
Are there any ways to do this?
If not, how could I go about making a function that does it, given a QGraphicsEffect to get the radius and color from?
Thanks in advance!
I don't think it is directly possible to "draw text with shadow", it is only possible to apply a shadow to something already drawn that would take in an element and use say its alpha channel to calculate the shadow.
You should use composition, either of the final products or during drawing. It should work if you use it on a text element. The other option would be to draw your text in black, apply Gaussian blur and then again draw the text on top of it with the desired offset.
Thanks for your answer ddriver, it made me search with some new keywords, which lead me to find a suiting solution for my project.
What I figured out is that you can simply create a QLabel with the text and effects you want (QGraphicsDropShadowEffect, in my case), and render it into a QPixmap using QWidget::grab(). You can then draw this new pixmap with QPainter as you would any other image, by converting your pixmap to a QImage and using QPainter's drawImage().

Cocos2d CCLabelBMFont how to add a background to string

I am wondering how can I add a border & background to labels generated via CCLabelBMFont class in cocos2d.
I don't want to use sprites because my labels are generated on the fly and will keep changing and the size of labels are also different.
Also, I want user to touch and move these labels across the screen. When user picks a label it wiggles a bit like in free air. In that case, I wish to keep low complexity and preserve memory and cpu calculations.
Anyone knows best ways to achieve this?
IOS app LetterPress has similar effects.
Create your own class, that will incapsulate creation of complex node.
It will have several layers, for example, the first layer can be simple CCLayerColor of given rect with zOrder -2, the next layer will be your CCLabelBMFont with zOrder -1 and then you can overload draw method to draw border over your control. All that you draw in this method will be drawn with zOrder 0.
Then you can encapsulate any effects in this class. For example, you can rotate it a bit with method pick, etc. Whatever you want.

New to OpenGL, working on "paint" program

I'm taking a computer graphics course this semester at college and our first assignment is to build a program that works much like Microsoft paint. We need to set options for drawing with shapes of different colors, sizes, and transparency parameters.
I'm having trouble finding information on how to program the ability to draw with a given shape on mouse drag. I'm not asking for the solution in code, but guidance on where to study functions that might accomplish this.
I'm completely new to OpenGL (but not C++) & I own "Computer Graphics with OpenGL" 4th ed. by Hearn & Baker. None of the topics suggest this capability.
What's probably asked from you is creating a single bufferd window, or switching to draw on the front buffer, and draw some shape at the mouse pointers location, when a button is pressed (and dragged), without clearing the frontbuffer inbetween. For added robustness draw to a Frame Buffer Object attached texture, so that dragging some window will not coorupt the user's drawing.
Keywords: Set Viewport to Window size. Ortho projection to window bounds, do not use glClear (except for resetting the picture).

Qt GUI Development - Displaying a 2D grid using QGraphicsView

I'm new to Qt development so I've being trying to research a solution to a user interface I need to design. My project is to simulate players in an online game moving around a global map. To represent the map I need to display a 2D grid, with each space in the grid representing a region of a map. I then need to display the location of each player in the game. The back-end is all fully working, with the map implemented as a 2D array. I'm just stuck on how to display the grid.
The research I have done has led me to believe a QGraphicsView is the best way to do this, but I can't seem to find a tutorial relevant to what I need. If anyone has any tips on how to implement this it would be much appreciated.
Thanks, Dan
A 2D Grid is nothing more than a set of horizontal and vertical lines. Suppose you have a 500x500 map and you want to draw a grid where the distance between the lines in both directions is 50. The sample code that follows shows you how you can achieve it.
// create a scene and add it your view
QGraphicsScene* scene = new QGraphicsScene;
ui->view->setScene(scene);
// Add the vertical lines first, paint them red
for (int x=0; x<=500; x+=50)
scene->addLine(x,0,x,500, QPen(Qt::red));
// Now add the horizontal lines, paint them green
for (int y=0; y<=500; y+=50)
scene->addLine(0,y,500,y, QPen(Qt::green));
// Fit the view in the scene's bounding rect
ui->view->fitInView(scene->itemsVBoundingRect());
You should check the QGraphicsView and the QGraphicsScene documentation as well as the corresponding examples. Also you can watch the graphics view training videos or some graphics view related videos from the Qt developer days.
Well if you have a constant grid size or even a limited number of grid sizes what i like to do is to draw a grid block in gimp or any other program and then set that as the background brush (draw only bottom and right side of the block) qt will repeat the image and will give you a full grid. I think this is good for performance too.
This is the grid image i used in one of my programs it's 10x10 pixels.
Then call QGraphicsScene setBackgroundBrush as the follwing:
scene->setBackgroundBrush(QBrush(QPixmap(":/grid/grid10.png")));
The more native way is this:
scene = self.getScene() # Your scene.
brush = QBrush()
brush.setColor(QColor('#999'))
brush.setStyle(Qt.CrossPattern) # Grid pattern.
scene.setBackgroundBrush(brush)
borderColor = Qt.black
fillColor = QColor('#DDD')
rect = QRectF(0.0, 0.0, 1280, 720) # Screen res or whatever.
scene.addRect(rect,borderColor,fillColor) # Rectangle for color.
scene.addRect(rect,borderColor,brush) # Rectangle for grid.
Sorry by PyQt...
Suppose a scene is set to the graphicsview then simply below one line will show the grid.
ui->graphicsView->scene()->setBackgroundBrush(Qt::CrossPattern);
There several other values can be passed for ex: Qt::Dense7Pattern
These are members of enum BrushStyle, just click on any used value in Qt creator and it will take you to the enum declaration where you can see all other possible values.
PS:
A scene can be set like this:
ui->graphicsView->setScene(new QGraphicsScene());