Re: [Gzz] Background

[Benja Fallenstein]

Hi Matti,

no time to reply in detail (have to go to school), but--

Matti Katila wrote:

> This leads to some problems:
>   -A view can't have an image on background
>   -It isn't easy to change the color of a specified view because the 
>    color isn't an attribute of the view.

I think this is the point that needs discussing first: Why would we want 
to change the bg color of one view specifically? So far we're using bg 
colors to distinguish windows-- in the LightColorScheme, windows' bg 
colors match the color of windows' cursors, because I have found in 
practice (not from research, but explanations to Gzz users) that the 
relationship between the cursors and their windows is not clear to many 
people, so I thought it may help if I can say, "green cursor--green 
window; blue cursor--blue window, see?" Additionally, we have used bg 
color as a mode indicator, rendering a white background when in text 
edit mode, because many people got lost and didn't know what was going 
on (they entered text when they wanted to move around in zzspace).

I don't see that specifying the bg color per window is particularly 
useful. I agree that some views might want to customize the bg color, 
but I don't think that holds for most.

Additionally, there won't be so few instances of views around 
eventually-- Gzz 0.6 went up to something like 20 to 30 different views, 
and if Gzz ever becomes popular, I'd estimate we have much more than 
that. From that perspective, putting the bg colors in the views doesn't 
seem elegant either.

I'd propose keeping the bg information in the Fallback.Win by default, 
and make it create a bg vob for each vobscene, which the view can 
optionally override somehow (maybe simply by placing another bg vob in 
coordsys 0 in the vob scene). As Tuomas said earlier, this also allows 
having an image on the background. But the point here is that we don't 
agree on your second assumption of what is a problem, above-- could you 
elaborate why you want this?

- Benja