Conflict between Animations and Menu Animations in 2.95b

Published on June 2, 2006 By Will Rose In WindowFX

There appears to be a conflict between two of WindowFX's options.

In the Advanced settings of the "Animations" section, selecting "Never use open" or "Never use close" also affects the corresponding Menu Animation.

For example, I prefer to have "Never use open animations" checked because I've found a lot of programs lock up if their window doesn't appear right away. If I do this, and have Menu Animations enabled in WFX, I only see the animation when the menu is going away. Clicking on a new menu snaps the new menu into view instantly, then moving the pointer away from it causes the menu to dissolve away as per the animation.

Is this working as designed, or is this a bug? I don't think it's desirable to have the one setting affect both window animations and menu animations.

Other than this, the animations seem very nice, and generally work better than in WFX 2.x

I'm using WFX 2.95[b].004 (the 3.0 pre-release)

Thanks,

-Will

Comments

Neil Banfield

on Jun 03, 2006

That is by design. The setting impacts all animations.

If you do have problems with apps locking up then please tell us so we can investigate the problem.

Will Rose

on Jun 03, 2006

Thanks for the feedback Neil... It's too bad it affects everything, but I thought that might indeed be the case.

Here's a brief list of programs I've excluded because WinFX gives them fits:
Photoshop CS
ObjectBar
QuickTime Player 7
Shareaza
WallMaster Pro
WaveLab (Steinberg)
WBCONFIG.EXE (the Windowblinds config screen, current version)
Windows Media Player 9

I have some others, but they're pretty obscure... These are well known.

Also, I have noticed an actual problem with the Menu Animations...

If you're moving your point across the menu bar, each menu will roll up or fade out or whatever the animation is as you leave that menu, but if you move your pointer on before the animation is complete (i.e. you're more than 1 menu ahead of the animation) that animations will remain partially painted on screen. That partially painted animation will remain on the screen until you go back to that menu, pull it down, and click it back up again.

Basically the problem is that the WFX animation queue is only one animation deep. Moving mouse from menu 1 to menu 2 causes #1 to fade out and #2 to fade in. But moving on through menu 2 to menu 3 before the fade on #1 is done exhibits this bug. It happens on any animation, not just fades.

I'll have to turn menu animations off until this is fixed, since I'm rather quick with the mouse. Setting the duration to anything longer than very short just makes the problem occur more often.

Thanks....

Neil Banfield

on Jun 03, 2006

The WFX animation queue is not 1 animation deep! (WFX can actually process a massive number of animations at once)

What problems are you having with Wbconfig & Animations?

Will Rose

on Jun 03, 2006

Neil, thanks for looking into this...

Ok, well regardless of how deep the animation queue actually is, why am I seeing that behavior with the menu animations? If more than one "outgoing" animation is active at once, it gets messed up on my screen.

I'll try to get some screenshots in here:

Here's what happens with WinFX menu animations problem I was describing:
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v165/will_rose/menu1.jpg

You can see the remnants of the file menu, when it should be long gone. It will stay there until you remove it as I described.

And here's what WinFX does to wbconfig:
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v165/will_rose/wb.jpg

As you can see (hopefully) from the pic (or the link), the Loading screen appears in a different place from the interface, and stays on the screen permanently, even after wbconfig is closed.

Thanks,

Will

Will Rose

on Jun 04, 2006

Neil,

I did some experimenting with different driver versions to try and shed some more light on these issues, and here's what I came up with:

The menu animation issue does NOT occur with the stock VGA driver for XP. Using that driver you can watch 5 different menus fade away if you move fast enough; it works beautifully. The problem DOES occur, however, on all recent (< 1 year) NVidia drivers, including the latest 84.21.
There are other WinFX graphical corruptions (that occur when you use opening animations with WB per-pixel skins) that also do not occur with the stock VGA driver but do with all NVidia drivers. (I'm using a 6800 Ultra, by the way.)

Despite the obvious correctness of your code, which I say due to the fact that it works with stock VGA drivers, it sure would be nice if you could get it to work properly with NVidia drivers, since obviously stock VGA is unusable.

One interesting thing is that since WinFX does not seem to use menu opening animations (it DOES use closing, though) with WB per-pixel skins, the menu animation corruption I depicted does not occur when using a per-pixel skin, but does occur when using a non-per-pixel skin, where both opening and closing menu animations are active. It also does not occur on any types of skins if you manually disable opening animations in WinFX. Another graphical corruption, the non-painting of scrollbar and throbber areas when a new explorer window is opened when window opening animations are active, only occurs when using per-pixel skins.

Also, the problem with wbload I depicted above DOES occur with the stock VGA driver. It is only readily visible at resolutions above 800x600 however. It seems that as the desktop resolution increases, and WinFX is trying to do an opening animation to wbload, that white "loading" box doesn't get displaced to where it should be. The interface screen wants to open basically in the middle of the screen, but at higher resolutions the white loading box doesn't move with it. My screenshot was takeon on a desktop running at 1600x1200, so the gap between the interface window and the "loading" box is large. At 1024x768, the gap is smaller, but still present.

Thanks again for looking into this, and if there's any other info I can provide, please let me know.

Will

Spagnacious

on Aug 21, 2006

Jeeze, I guess Neil's email must have died.

Neil Banfield

on Aug 22, 2006

The problem with wbconfig was fixed with a wbconfig update and the other issue appears to be a driver bug.

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