HUD plugin brings window to life (PowerBASIC version)

[Patrice Terrier]

This project must be used on VISTA or SEVEN running in AERO mode.

The combination of a transparent HUD window with a visual plugin playing in the background, brings up new programming perspectives. It doesn't require the use of "Windows Presentation Foundation" nor the encapsulation of multimedia features inside the running application.

All the hard stuff is being processed by the ZWP.exe plugin engine, that has a small CPU footprint, to be cooperative with the other running applications. In essence ZWP.exe works like a child process that can interact with the main process. ZWP.exe is able to use any of the BassBox plugins, however those provided with the project have been rewritten specificaly to look good as animated backgrounds.

HUDplus, is written in low level SDK code and it is a mixing of GDImage and WinLIFT to be compatible with the Windows Destop Manager technology.

The use of the composited AERO mode, allows you to create amazing eye candy, with ultimate speed display, because everything is handled by the GPU instead of using the conventional CPU.


How to use this project:

You need a computer with a graphic card AERO compatible

To show you the use of variable opacity, "Naavi HUD", is provided with several backgrounds that you can change on the fly.
To do it, click with the left or right mouse button, on the icon located on the top left of the window, asside the caption title.

The circular gauges rotate the Naavi on herself, and the vertical slider zoom in/out.
You can move the sprite around using the mouse drag and drop.

For the best visual result, you shoud use a dark Windows wallpaper background.

To start the animation, click on the "Visual plugin" check box, and make sure you are using a transparent background (click on the Naavi icon to select a new one), or check the "Transparent HUD mode".


Audio files:
You can use any music tracker format (mod, xm, it, mtm, s3m, mo3), and mp3 or ogg audio files.


Source code:

It shows you what is really going on under the hood, without the obscurification of DotNET or C++ classes. Everything is written in pure SDK programming style, with a standard message pump, and a WndProc callback to perform the message cracking.


Visual plugin mode:

The animation is playing in the background, without alteration of the speed of the parent application.

The plugins are stored into the "EXE\BBplugin" folder.


Screen shot with the "HUD_Maelstrom" plugin




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[Patrice Terrier]

The first post of this thread has been updated, to fix the ZIP file corruption caused by the "Server Collapse".

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