DirectX-based game display always on top. Need solution - windows-10

You can see the video of the problem below. When I press the Minimize button, the screen disappears, but when you put the other window on top without pressing the Minimize button, the screen will not be covered and it will always float on top. This problem did not occur in Windows 7, but it occurs after upgrading to Windows 10.
Problem video
I would like to know the DirectX initialization code for the function or function argument related to this problem. (As far as I know, this game uses DirectX 9.)
Additional Information
Based on Castorix's advice, I used the Spy ++ program to test it. Below is the result screen.
The problematic program consisted of two windows, a parent window and a child window. The parent window style consists of WS_CAPTION, WS_MINIMIZE, WS_VISIBLE, WS_CPLISIBLINGS, WS_SYSMENU, WS_OVERLAPPED, WS_MINIMIZEBOX, WS_MAXIMIZEBOX, 0x00008000. And the child window style consists of WS_CHILDWINDOW, WS_VISIBLE, WS_BORDER.
Additional Information 2
If you look carefully at the above video, when the game window goes under the notepad window, the game title bar is hidden, but you can see that the game screen is always on top instead of just being covered.

Related

Drawing Custom Context Menus Anywhere on Desktop

I'm trying to figure out a way to draw a context menu foo at the cursor's current position no matter where on screen it is (i.e. over a window that has nothing to do with my program), and I can't seem to find a clean way of doing this, as all the libraries I can find define context menus upon the current window.
The things that come to mind for me are:
A: Drawing a tiny window at the cursor and then immediately opening up a context window
B: Drawing borderless windows that act like context menus
C: Drawing directly to the root window
However, none of these seem like clean and portable solutions, so I figured I would ask before diving into code.
I know that this is not what context menus were designed for, but the look fits my application very well. I would prefer to use Qt to keep things portable across systems, but at the moment I really only care about X on Linux.
Edit: 1st paragraph expansion

How to make an overlay which capture no events

I would like to draw some sort of window on top of all the other windows. For example, to display some debugging infos (like conky) or things like a timer.
The main thing is that I would like to able to continue using the other windows while using it (the events go through transparently).
I've tried doing it with pygtk, pyqt and others but can't find a way to make it a real overlay with no event capture.
Is there some low-level x11 solution?
I think the Composite-extension-approach will not work when a compositing manager is running (and thus Composite's overlay window is already used).
Since you explicitly mention "no event capture":
The SHAPE extension allows to set some different shapes for a window. Version 1.1 of this extension added the "input" shape. Just setting this to an empty region should pretty much do what you want.
Some concrete example of exactly what I think you ask for can be found in Conky's source code: http://sources.debian.net/src/conky/1.10.3-1/src/x11.cc/?hl=769#L764-L781
Edit: Since you said that you didn't find anything in Gtk (well, PyGtk), here is the function that you need in Gtk: https://developer.gnome.org/gdk3/stable/gdk3-Windows.html#gdk-window-input-shape-combine-region
You might need Composite extension + GetOverlayWindow request:
Version 0.3 of the protocol adds the Composite Overlay Window, which
provides compositing managers with a surface on which to draw without
interference. This window is always above normal windows and is always
below the screen saver window. It is an InputOutput window whose width
and height are the screen dimensions. Its visual is the root visual
and its border width is zero. Attempts to redirect it using the
composite extension are ignored. This window does not appear in the
reply of the QueryTree request. It is also an override redirect
window. These last two features make it invisible to window managers
and other X11 clients. The only way to access the XID of this window
is via the CompositeGetOverlayWindow request. Initially, the Composite
Overlay Window is unmapped.
CompositeGetOverlayWindow returns the XID of the Composite Overlay
Window. If the window has not yet been mapped, it is mapped by this
request. When all clients who have called this request have terminated
their X11 connections the window is unmapped.
Composite managers may render directly to the Composite Overlay
Window, or they may reparent other windows to be children of this
window and render to these. Multiple clients may render to the
Composite Overlay Window, create child windows of it, reshape it, and
redefine its input region, but the specific arbitration rules followed
by these clients is not defined by this specification; these policies
should be defined by the clients themselves.
C api : XCompositeGetOverlayWindow
PyGTK Solution:
I think the composite and shapes X extensions are sufficiently ubiquitous and shall assume here that they are active on your system. Here's PyGtk code for this:
# avoid title bar and standard window minimize, maximize, close buttons
win.set_decorated(False)
# make the window stick above all others (super button will still override it in the z-order, which is fine)
win.set_keep_above(True)
# make events pass through
region = cairo.Region(cairo.RectangleInt(0, 0, 0, 0))
my_window.input_shape_combine_region(region)
win.show_all()
# set the entire window to be semi-transparent, if we like
win.set_opacity(0.2)
Basically what this does is tell Gtk that other than pixel (0,0) the entire window my_window should not be considered part of itself in terms of event propagation. That in turn, according to my current understanding means that when the pointer moves and clicks, the events go to the underlying window under the pointer position, as if my_window was not there.
Caveat:
This does allow your overlay window being the focus window (due to user-solicited window switching or just because it pops up and gets the focus when your application starts). Which means that for example, keyboard events will still undesirably go to it up until the user has clicked through it to make it lose focus in favor of whatever window is under the cursor. I would likely use the approach described here to iron out this aspect.
If there's a different and proper approach for making a portion of the screen "display stuff but not receive events", without building an oddball window like above over it, I'm happy to learn about it.
I assume that one's particular desktop environment (gnome, unity, etc. on linux) may interfere with this solution depending on version and configuration, on some occasions.

Why does the task bar appear when I display a self-drawn modeless dialog? .. sometimes?

I have an interesting (but frustraring) problem. I have an application which uses the full screen (this is meant to simulate a third-party fullscreen POS application).
My application displays a sequence of modeless dialog boxes on top of the full screen application. It shows one, hides it, then shows the next, hides it etc. After the 3rd show, the Windows taskbar appears about 1 second later. I can't figure out why.
I've stripped my code right back to see if its something I'm doing in my OnNcActivate handler (which I use to draw my skinned window) but I don't think it is as the problem appears to be timing related. I've tried running Spy++ as well as dumping messages in m WindowProc myself and I still can't see anything odd that would give me any clues.
There are some messages with ID 0x36e in my logs but I can't find out what they are supposed to be. I've checked various message ID lists and can't find them. They shouldn't be any message IDs of my own since WM_USER doesn't start until 0x400.
I know I could get around this problem by auto-hiding the taskbar but I can't ask our customers to configure their taskbars to auto-hide to get round my problem.
Any ideas why the taskbar would appear in relation to my modeless dialog boxes?
EDIT: I completely stripped out my self-drawn GUI code and I still have the same problem. I could be wrong but it would seem that when I call ShowWindow( SW_HIDE) first, Windows tries to activate "another Window" (as it says in MSDN). I think in this case its activating the taskbar rather than the POS application. If on the other hand I open my second window before calling ShowWindow( SW_HIDE ) on the second, then it seems to behave itself.
Cheers
Sparky
Following a long discussion I come to the conclusion that DestroyWindow was not the problem. I found in the end that displaying a dialog.. clicking on the POS, then clicking back on the dialog that sometimes the taskbar would appear. I have spent an entire week trying to find reasons for all of this but to no avail. I thought that assigning the POS window as the owner would solve the problem - it didn't. In the end the solution for my problem was to determine if the taskbar is obscured completely before showing my dialog. If it is, I hide the taskbar for the duration which my dialog is displayed (set its placement to SW_HIDE) and then set it to SW_SHOW when I close my dialog. The task bar doesn't pop up and annoy people anymore. Not a fantastic solution for other peoples' applications perhaps, but perfect for our customers.

Desktop effects (compiz) turned on: How to capture the image of a window WITH border/frame/title bar?

I would like to get the image of an X server Window (toplevel window, parent is the root Window) with its border/frame/title bar. I have already tried several libraries (Xlib, XRender, gdk, cairo) but none of them works. The captured image has the same geometry as the window but the frame is missing.
The problem is that the child window which should hold the frame image is InputOnly. The reason might be for this that the frame is rendered by the window decorator on the fly the same time as the Window itself.
I cannot capture the image from the RootWindow as the Window might be partially or entirely covered.
Redecorating the captured Window image could be an alternative.
Any suggestions? Thanks.
PS. When compiz is not running everything works as expected.
I use shutter for screen shots on linux, it's super easy to capture whatever portion of the screen you want. As a bonus, there are tools to add arrows or highlight sections.
http://shutter-project.org/preview/screenshots/

How to determine visible region of a Windows in X Windows / Linux?

I have several nested X Windows - let's say - a scrollable window within a scrollable window (see the example below). In such case the main window contains (at least) the major scroll bars and the (major) drawing area they control. This drawing area on its turn contains (at least) a scrollable window batch - a (minor) main window, containing a scroll bar and minor drawing area.
During live scrolling of an inner drawing area the redraw procedure messes up, because I am using the XCopyArea to speed the process and move the contents that are valid and invoke the actual redraw routine for just the newly appeared content. This works fine when the inner drawing batch is by itself, but when nested within another one a problem occurs - when the inner scrolling-batck is partially visible (i.e. the major drawing area is scrolled) redrawing of newly appeared contents is clipped from the major drawing area and never actually redrawn, but considered to be so. When on the next scroll XCopyArea gets this supposedly-redrawn area it is actually empty. Finally this empty area show up on the partially visible inner scrolling-batch and it is empty. On the first general redraw message they are fixed.
If I can obtain the clipping mask for what is actually visible from (my) inner drawing area I can adjust the XCopyArea() call and redraw call and overcome the problem without the plan "B" which is redrawing all contents on each scroll bar movement.
Example: Developing a plugin for Mozilla Firefox and needing to determine the region that describes the visible area of "my" window, i.e. the one that is passed from the Mozilla system as plugin viewport.
If its really an X Window you get, and not a widget from some specific toolkit (like GTK+ maybe?) then you can use the XGetWindowAttributes function call.
This fills out a provided XWindowAttributes structure, which includes integers for the x and y position of the window as well as its width and height and other useful facts.
But in reality I think you are probably using the Mozilla plugin API inherited from Netscape, aka NSAPI, and in that case what you get is a call to your function NPP_SetWindow() at least once (and again if necessary because something changed) with a structure which contains the information you're looking for. Try looking at http://www.mozilla.org/projects/plugins/ for more information about the APIs you should use.

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