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The Topographic Apprentice
Control Panel Library
Architecture
Issue: 3.4 (March/April 2005)
Author: Joe Nastasi
Author Bio: Joe Nastasi is the president of Pyramid Design, a software development firm and the developers of A-OK! Spacecraft Simulation System and FTP Suite.
Article Description: No description available.
Article Length (in bytes): 4,509
Starting Page Number: 38
RBD Number: 3417
Resource File(s): None
Related Link(s): None
Known Limitations: None
Excerpt of article text...
In keeping with the theme of "a picture is worth a thousand words," I offer Figure 1, which illustrates how the control panel library treats a typical gauge (an altimeter in this case) internally. The panel background image is the furthest from the camera with a Z position of -4. Note that the actual values in the Z axis might vary depending on how many layers you have in your instruments. For example, if this were a 3 needle gauge, we'd need to make the panel's Z position -5 instead. The altimeter background image is next with a Z position of -3. The black background is part of the masking scheme and will be transparent when displayed. We'll discuss masking in a later issue.
Figure 1: Panel Elements
The next two images are the 100 and 1000 foot needles, occupying Z positions of -2 and -1, respectively. Finally, a center cap occupies Z position 0. The X and Y position of the altimeter elements determines the position of the instrument relative to the center of the control panel background. All elements have the same X and Y position values so that they remain centered when displayed.
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Article copyrighted by REALbasic Developer magazine. All rights reserved.
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