Hello, I am currently implementing VolatileImage for a rather exotic system (WindML). If I understand it correctly, the VolatileImage class is meant to support HW accelerated offscreen images. There are two ways to get hold of a VolatileImage, Component.createVolatileImage() and GraphicsConfiguration.createCompatibleVolatileImage(). I am wondering about the following:
1. What are these methods supposed to do in the case when there is no video RAM left? Should they return null, or something suboptimal? From the API specs this is not clear to me. Some of these methods even accept an ImageCapabilities object to specify the requirements (e.g. accelerated), but what if the backend can't fullfill these requirements? 2. Since JDK5 the GC methods have variants for accepting a transparency value. What if the transparency requirements can't be met? For instance, on my system there is no way that the graphics chip can render into a translucent bitmap. The best thing I can do is software rendering. As far as I can see there would be 3 possibilities: 1. Ignore the ImageCapabilities and/or transparency hint and return the best that the backend can offer. 2. Return the best that the backend can offer that fullfills the hints. This would result in software rendering for some cases. 3. Return null to indicate to the application that such a VolatileImage is not available. It seems that #1 could be confusing, when an app exclicitly expects for example TRANSLUCENT and gets an OPAQUE only image. #2 would probably be better handled by returning null to let the app know that there is no support on the backend, and let the app try to get a BufferedImage instead. Any insights here? In any case, I think it would be helpful (for both application developers and API implementors) to add some bits to the specs. Regards, Roman -- http://kennke.org/blog/ =========================================================================== To unsubscribe, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] and include in the body of the message "signoff JAVA2D-INTEREST". For general help, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] and include in the body of the message "help".
