How did we get a transparent 2D HUD in the FA-18? I thought that wasn't possible?

Someone was asking about this earlier today, and now that we're not busy getting XPack out the door, I finally have time to answer it. 

We made some changes to the XPack code base to allow this.

And we added a flag to gauges.h: IMAGE_ERASE_ALWAYS.

Note that your gauge update rate will suffer a bit, since we erase the entire image before redrawing it again.

The gauge that we use for the 2D panel is 99% the same as the one we map into the 3D cockpit, but differs in that the 2D gauge has the new IMAGE_ERASE_ALWAYS flag applied and that its background bitmap is transparent (all black) instead of white.

Comments

• Anonymous
  November 14, 2007
  Well, it's about time!  It's a pity that the new flag will only work with FSX + SP2 though, since the market using that is still far too small at present... :(

• Anonymous
  November 14, 2007
  Thank you thank you thank you!

• Anonymous
  November 17, 2007
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  November 22, 2007
  Thank you for the update on this Susan! It was the former "NO_STATIC_BLENDING" flag in previous versions (FS8 at least) and has always worked before as a "ERASE_ALWAYS" feature. In fact, we used this for a long time in many gauges for some special purposes. The thing is that in FS9 this flag seemed to no longer be used, and we used it for different purposes. Now, with Acell, introducing this flag back causes a failure (CTD) in one particular case: when the first element layer uses "IMAGE_HIDDEN" on a STATIC, and the second layer uses "IMAGE_ERASE_ALWAYS", then it CTDs. Best regards,

• Anonymous
  November 28, 2007
  We have also had transparent and fully VC illuminated HUDs for a long time now. What am I missing? Are we talking about transparent symbology (i.e. the actual text is partially transparent)? RE:RELOAD_PANELS. Sigh:0, I feel your pain. --Jon