I think I stumbled upon this UNIFIED issue a while ago but the
workaround by setting -Dprism.forceUploadingPainter=true fixes it. And
these applications have been tested by many users no one ever mentioned
issues, so I'm reasonably sure that everything works fine here.
On macOS, it adds a NSGlassEffectView subview behind the default JavaFX
NSView, yes. Any transparency is handled correctly with this approach
when the stage style is UNIFIED. It would be great if EXTENDED could
support this as well.
In general, it would be desirable for EXTENDED to have all the
properties of UNIFIED, otherwise I don't see much use for it.
Furthermore, an API to apply these window background themes without any
custom native calls would be cool as well, but here the challenge is
whether it would be accepted to have a platform-specific list of
available materials/themes in the API, plus a few customization options.
Because I don't see the possibility of a generic API that works well on
all platforms as they all work so differently.
On 13/11/2025 18:09, Martin Fox wrote:
Christopher,
It will only work with UNIFIED. With the exception of UNIFIED and
TRANSPARENT the core Java code will draw an opaque background fill
behind the scene.
On macOS the glass platform code will remove the layer’s alpha channel
unless the stage style is UNIFIED. I think that’s a workaround for a
bug that has long since been fixed (don’t have the bug number handy).
That logic wasn’t carried over to the Metal branch and I would like to
remove it for OpenGL as well.
UNIFIED doesn’t work reliably on Windows since the rendering pipeline
isn’t guaranteed to add an alpha channel (see
https://bugs.openjdk.org/browse/JDK-8154847). Are you doing something
to kick the HWND so you always get an alpha channel?
On macOS you must be adding a visual effect view to what is known as
the host view. It’s vestigial these days but I always figured it would
come in handy as a container for a visual effect view. Looks like
you’ve discovered that also.
Martin
On Nov 13, 2025, at 8:22 AM, Christopher Schnick <[email protected]>
wrote:
Haha yeah I thought the MonkeyTester would make a good demo content
page for a sample application. And it does!
On 13/11/2025 17:20, Andy Goryachev wrote:
What Kickstart FX? :-)
Joking, joking, I am glad you found it helping.
-andy
*
Confidential- Oracle Internal
From: *openjfx-dev <[email protected]> on behalf of
Christopher Schnick <[email protected]>
*Date: *Thursday, November 13, 2025 at 06:27
*To: *Michael Strauß <[email protected]>
*Cc: *OpenJFX <[email protected]>
*Subject: *Re: StageStyle.EXTENDED with transparent background
We run our applications with native materials for some time now
without any issues.
On Windows 11, it uses the Mica material for the Stage. It
automatically adjusts based on the system theme, so you will always
have a good look and contrast for all theme configurations. The mica
material can also be swtiched to the acrylic one, however the
acrylic theme was primarily intended for Windows 10 and is being
replaced by Mica for Windows 11.
On macOS, it uses the new Liquid Glass material in macOS 26 and the
Vibrant material for older versions. With Liquid Glass you can also
configure the tint if needed.
This can all be achieved via a few native calls with the existing
Stages, at least with the older stage styles like Unified.
Isn't the original issue just about the extended stage style using a
white background? I'm no expert on the implementation, but the other
types of Stages like Unified show their background if you set the
Scene and root node background to be transparent. Normally that
window fill was always white anyway as JavaFX did not support window
theming before, but if the window theme is set to something
different, then that sticks out. Is there something fundamentally
limiting so that the Extended stage is forced to draw a white
background?
Unified:
<aBRzaHD5w0KvUgrJ.png>
Extended, even with DWMWA_USE_IMMERSIVE_DARK_MODE set to true:
<HRrOi0IB1NCsFlHW.png>
On 13/11/2025 00:33, Michael Strauß wrote:
I finally got around to looking into this. I see two
requests here, one to add per-pixel window transparency to
EXTENDED stages and another to support backdrop materials
like Windows’ Mica and Acrylic. On the Mac adding per-pixel
transparency to all stage styles is easy. On Windows it
would take a lot more work and as far as I know can’t be
done with the existing DX9 back end (the necessary
DirectComposition API’s are tied to DX11). We would also
need to reconcile platform differences related to hit
testing and drop shadows. So it’s a big ask.
I think we can probably get there by using a WS_EX_LAYERED
window like we do for StageStyle.TRANSPARENT, if we accept the
significant performance impact. With DirectComposition, we can
directly interface with the DWM composition engine and skip the
GDI window surface completely. This requires a fair bit of
integration with JavaFX that goes beyond changes in the Glass
toolkit. However, it doesn't require a D3D11 rendering pipeline.
It works with the existing D3D9 pipeline by having D3D9 render
into a shared off-screen surface, which is then accessed by
DirectComposition with ID3D11Device::OpenSharedResource.
(I know there’s a DX12 version of JavaFX in the works but
it’s hard for me to get enthused. I run Windows in a VM and
it’s likely to be stuck on DX11 for a long time.) Supporting
translucent backdrop materials is simpler since we can ask
the OS to draw the effect and then composite the JavaFX
content over it all within an opaque window. This is how the
UNIFIED stage style works so we can leverage that logic. On
Mac this is easy to set up. On Windows 11 22H2 and beyond we
can easily access a couple of materials. For earlier Windows
versions or for a more extensive list of materials we would
need to roll our own using DirectComposition.
That's correct, it's reasonably simple to support
platform-provided backdrop materials. Anything custom is a lot
more difficult. I have a prototype of JavaFX with
DirectComposition, along with a custom acrylic implementation.
It's very old, and looks like this (running on Windows 10):
https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/cd702a74-603a-4d7e-9078-52f915a4448a
In the end, there doesn't seem to be much common ground between
the various OS platforms for any reasonably powerful
cross-platform API. Maybe we could have the supporting
infrastructure in JavaFX, but only exposing API in a
platform-specific module (either as part of OpenJFX or 3rd
party)? This certainly requires quite a bit of work.
I know nothing about DirectComposition but I’m pretty sure
someone on this list has used it to prototype an Acrylic
effect for JavaFX. I’ll see if I can find that e-mail. I’m
particularly interested in whether this can easily be turned
on and off on-the-fly and how dark mode would be handled
(the platform-provided materials respond to dark mode).
I've never heard of any previous effort, and it couldn't have
been me beacuse I haven't talked about this up util now. I'd be
interested to learn about other attempts at solving this.
