Early WIP on v2.55

[Patrice Terrier]

Do not create the Splitter window with DWORD dwStyle = WS_POPUP | WS_VISIBLE; !

there was no splitter.h is the three latest patches i got from you 

And you are living two days ahead of me 

[Michael Lobko-Lobanovsky]

And you are living two days ahead of me 

I was planning to hold back my mods till Christmas to be able to add saving the configuration file.

But I was so excited about the Model Slicer that I decided to share it with you a.s.a.p.

[Patrice Terrier]

Here is the screenshot done with your HELP_MSWORD.rtf

[Michael Lobko-Lobanovsky]

Formidable!

But still not in my OR. The image sizes are all broken.

[Patrice Terrier]

Were you using Seven or W10 with your screen shot?

For all image colors except black and white, they are indeed using dithering

[Michael Lobko-Lobanovsky]

This is Win 7 which is my main development platform on my workstation, as well as on the workstations of perhaps a billion other human beings on the planet Earth.

This however may be due to the OS differences. Do you want me to switch on my W10 box and check? At any rate, something must be done with it under Win 7 and 8/8.1. Not all of us are so fond of extreme diving as you are, my friend.

I don't see my embedded OR orb, it isn't visible at all, so I can't tell you if it's dithered in OR or not for me. Not with this particular file. I'll remove all other images so that I can see the orb at least partially and then I'll tell you if I'm able to see a non-dithered original PNG in OR under Win 7 at all... But I need to go back to XP to re-save the modded file correctly in MS Word.

Stay tuned in the mean time.

[Patrice Terrier]

That's a real pain that it doesn't work the same with Seven, i have no easy solution yet

[Michael Lobko-Lobanovsky]

No Patrice,

It's still bad under Win 7; see the attached snapshot.

I've also checked under my W10 and everything's looking perfect as in your own screenshot.

So go on with your help system and I'll be doing ARGB PNG embedding for you in my MS Office. I'll be concurrently thinking about HTML/PDF viewer controls in my spare time, and probably we'll switch over to something that works reliably under both W7 and 10 at some future point in time.

[Patrice Terrier]

Strange behavior when switching textures with MENU_VIEW_MIPMAP
try with the attached model.

[Patrice Terrier]

I'll be concurrently thinking about HTML/PDF viewer controls in my spare time

embedding a web browser is another solution, but more complex, and i am not speaking of the documentation itself so much easier to write with wordpad.

[Michael Lobko-Lobanovsky]

No,

The easiest way will be to use MS Windows' standard HH.exe (.CHM HTML help vewer application), subclass its main window at the moment of creation using a Windows hook, and make it a child window to our custom help window in OR.

This is exactly what the FBSL Eclecta editor does with its numerous help files, also skinning the help windows' non-client areas in the process...

 

[ADD] Re. the complexity of writing the text, we just write it in MS Word (or Libre Office) as usual embedding the images as needed, then save it in the HTML format, and then compile a bunch of them to a .CHM file (that's actually the bunch of .HTMs zipped with a custom header) that HH.exe is able to display, using MS Windows HTML Help Workshop or compatible.

[Michael Lobko-Lobanovsky]

The cyborg needs further investigation. I'm seeing this glitch for the first time in my life.

(I know of a few more texture glitches in my recent mods but I was too much in a hurry to present the mods to you. Actually I know how to, and I will, fix them all shortly. But they have nothing to do with this mipmapping glitch.)

[Michael Lobko-Lobanovsky]

Hmm, this RTF-equipped Obj Reader takes some substantially longer time to launch, possibly due to the time it takes the RichEdit control to load and parse this HELP.rtf file...

How long will it take it to parse some few hundred Megs of RTF markup when all the RTF help topics are ready?

[Patrice Terrier]

How long will it take it to parse some few hundred Megs of RTF markup when all the RTF help topics are ready?

For the RTF control, i am using exactly the code shown on MSDN there:
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/desktop/controls/using-rich-edit-com#complete-insertobject-example-function
however this code is probably designed to work on the current OS 

I do not see any speed impact on OR at startup on my computer when loading the RTF file.
But for slower computer, the loading could be done only when pressing the help button, just like what i had in mind for switching from one topic to another. Then the only thing that would be done at startup would be to detect the topic files to create the index listbox to select from, and display only a very short Welcome.rtf saying "ObjReader <logo>, please select a topic from the list.".
My idea was also to put all help files into one single dedicated HELP folder.

[Michael Lobko-Lobanovsky]

My PC is by no means slower than yours, especially at such trivial tasks as parsing and/or disk access; it's a 3.6GHz quad core with 16GB of RAM, after all. It takes this OR version some 2+ secs to load and appear on my screen. As things are, we are going to need a splash screen real soon.

My friend, you can do whatever you see best fit for your help system. What concerns me, I'll be looking for alternatives until I find something equally suitable for, and compatible under, both W7 and W10.