SynthMaker

First gripes

Archive · 2004 2 old posts

From the original SynthMaker forum (2004–2014), with its members’ names and dates.

Kudos ·

First of all, just a quick note about the website - set a BACKGROUND colour! All the graphics on outsim.com have a white ($FFFFFF) background, but my colour scheme has a pale beige background, which is used as the background for your webpages simply because there isn't one specified. All you need to do is throw in a BGCOLOR tage in each html file.

So far I've just intalled SynthMaker and opened it up, and the first thing I noticed was that resizing the window causes a lot of flicker - this could be cured. I have my system set to 'resize contents of windows while resizing' - the real-time thing. With most programs resizing is nice and smooth without flicker, but in SynthMaker, the left-hand panel with the tabs at the bottom is flickering, and I think it's just repainting the content of the tab pages each time I resize the window by one pixel.

I can tell that you have probably written the code to paint the detail in there - each of the bars with labels like 'Display', 'Envelope', 'Filers' etc. I have done a fair bit of work in Delphi, and (this is my suggestion to you), I found that to prevent flicker on repainting graphic areas like this, it actually made more sense to use seperate objects like TPanel, each which would have their own paint event. It made it easier to code the way they behaved with regards to size, position, and drag+drop events. It also removed flicker because they were only slightly altered versions of TPanel (TPanels NEVER flicker!), and I made the paint method into an assignable event so that I could write several different paint methods for the same object and switch them during run-time. Also I was able to insert my modified TPanels inside other ones (which came in handy).

Just a tip....I know you've worked hard on the GUI, but what I'm basically suggesting here is that content of the left hand panel should be not just one massive painted area but broken down into objects.

Now I shall start playing around with SynthMaker, and while I'm making strange sounds I'll see if there's anything else I could recommend!

K

jorge ·

I'm sorting the website to have a background color, I think I'll prefer to have the background black anyway but I'll have to change the bitmaps and Outsim's logo to have a transparent antialiased background, I'll actually use synthmaker as a tool to create those bitmaps ( I can write a tutorial on how to do that if someone is interested ) .

You're right about the way the toolbox works, it's actually quite easy to fix it I just didnt think of the case of real-time resizing updates. Each of the modules in the toolbox is drawn each time you resize, I'll change it to create a bitmap and use that instead.

I'm looking forward to your comments/suggestions when you're playing with synthmaker's sound.

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