Someone posted awhile back about finally creating the reflection on their gauge and posted pics. I guess the post has already been pruned, and I was trying to remember who it was. I had their email but lost it.If it was you, contact me.Patrick

'Twas me, I believe. Look familiar?http://www.cat-tamer.com/attach/gauge_alpha_highlight5.jpgMeant to send you this.http://www.cat-tamer.com/downloads/AS.zipIt got shuffled into a dark & dusty corner of my jump drive and I forgot about it. Sorry.This is the airspeed indicator rather than the DG and that's because by the time I got to the airspeed indicator I sort of had my .psd files figured out to the point that I could go back and modify the highlight if necessary. Earlier I was just making a whole new highlight every time when I wasn't happy with the result.What I was doing is modifying "airspeed_highlight.psd", (i.e. changing the opacity of the highlight layer, brightness & contrast, etc.) and then flattening it and saving it to "airspeed_highlight2.psd" so that I could copy the RGB entirely (without layers) to the alpha channel. I then saved it and opened it in imagetool, inverted the alpha channel, converted to 8 bit, and saved it as the final gauge highlight bitmap.I've refined the highlight in the gauge shot above a lot since we last talked. I've decided that the highlight needs to be more defined than it was in some of my earlier attempts. In other words, it looks better if the area that isn't part of the reflection is completely transparent revealing the black underneath as opposed to being just a foggy, darker part of the reflection. Hard to explain, it's art rather than science I guess. I did it by playing with the brightness & contrast of the highlight layer until it was basically black & white with no gray "in between" areas.The shadow is a different animal. The alpha doesn't get inverted here. The RGB looks entirely black, but it's not. Use your magic wand with tolerance set to zero and you'll see the crescent shaped area of 1,1,1. The bottom line is that white on the alpha makes the overlaying RGB transparent, where black on the alpha makes it opaque. Doesn't matter whether you're making a highlight or a shadow, the sim handles alpha in gauges the same in either case.Of course this all applies to XML gauges. I haven't the foggiest what will happen when you try it in your C gauges.Good luck, I'll check back.Jim

Oh, and the e-mail address is jimr(at)nidaho(dot)net :) .Jim

Jim,Thanks. I'll email you some "findings" after carefully reading what you had written earlier, and conducting some research.A couple of days ago during a lull in support of my new software, I took a shot at it, and found out some interesting things doing this is C gauges.Patrick