It's official -- I'm stuck in the 7th plane of windoze hell. :-( Please
help.
I've got the task of getting the Theme ui supported under 256 color mode in
windows. Shouldn't be a big deal, right? Wrong.
The Theme ui may get bitmaps from several files and then blit then into an
internal bitmap that eventually gets blitted onto a window. I would like to
have theme designers be able to use 8,16, and 24 bit bitmaps in their
themes. The theme ui should make sure everything looks good when it gets
displayed.
In 16 and 24 bit color modes this is not an issue. The problem arises when
the theme ui tries to take several 16 or 25 bit color bitmaps and display
them on an 8 bit display. I am currently using LoadImage to load the
bitmap -- this converts the bitmap to a DDB which I use from there on out.
However, when windows loads a 16 bit image and converts it to the DDB the
image consequently looks horrible. I even get the palette from the DDB and
realize the palette, but that does not seem to make any differnce.
As I understand it, if I want to get an accurate logical palette for a 16/24
bit bitmap that I load into memory, I need to quantize it down to a 8 bit
image myself. Letting windows do it renders the color table useless.
Do I really need to quantize the image myself? Or do I not quite understand
the Win32 API properly? In either case, does anyone know of any GPL
compatible code that would make my life easier? The petzold book has code to
do all this shit, but the source license is not compatible with the GPL.
Any help would be greatly appreciated.
--ruaok Freezerburn! All else is only icing. -- Soul Coughing
Robert Kaye -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://moon.eorbit.net/~robert
