I have a problem I am hoping somebody can help me with.I have some gauges that respond to night lighting by setting the bright image flag on certain parts, for example to make an engine gauge face and needle light up but not the background.I do this by setting the IMAGE_USE_BRIGHT flag on the elements and then setting the IMAGE_ON_SCREEN flag to force a redraw. I do this in the gauge pre draw. I do this 2 times when the lighting has changed, I don't want to set IMAGE_ON_SCREEN all the time.This works fine 95% of the time. However some times the bright flag will not take effect until the needle starts to move and sometimes not even then.I am doing something wrong to force a refresh? Does anybody know of a way around this?Thanks,Mark

If your gauge is on screen, then the IMAGE_ON_SCREEN flag is already set, and setting isn't going to "invalidate" and cause a redraw. Besides, anything you do in "pre-draw" is happening right before an update anyway.You only need to play with that flag if you want to take something off screen and then put it back later, like perhaps an "OFF" flag.The behavior you are seeing where the needle has to move is not your fault. In fact, if you set the time to a time at dusk, just before the lighting goes low enough to cause FS to begin using the IMAGE_USE_LUMINOUS colors, you will note the same behavior. That is that some gauges will change to the luminous color, and some will not until you "move" the needle.I believe this is just a bug in the lighting system. One way around it is to introduce a bit of jitter into your gauges, but this is not always appropriate.But, I would recommend setting the bright flag in the macro callbacks, that's what I do, and I have not run into this problem. This is because any change in that callback will cause a redraw.Also, if you are not updating the gauge at 18 Hz, this may be another reason you see no change.Good luck

I haven't tried setting it the callback. What about elements that don't have callbacks though?

Since MAKE_STATIC has no callback, change it to MAKE_SLIDER and create the two callbacks needed. Set the origin to 0,0 so it will behave like a MAKE_STATIC.I use this in slider, needle and ICON type callbacks to produce 'bi-level' lighting: if (panel_lights == 2) { LIGHT_IMAGE(pelement) ; } else if (panel_lights == 1) { DARKEN_IMAGE(pelement); LUMINOUS_IMAGE(pelement); } else if (panel_lights == 0) { DARKEN_IMAGE(pelement) ; }The extra DARKEN_IMAGE(pelement) is necessary to force the LIGHT_IMAGE "off" before using LUMINOUS_IMAGE when decreasing brightness... ;)For some elements, I need to 'clone' the MAKE_SLIDER, etc. macros and the callbacks, make necessary changes to make 'em unique (i.e., SLIDER_off, SLIDER_lo, SLIDER_hi), then use a combination of if (plights == 2){ SHOW_IMAGE(pelement); LIGHT_IMAGE(pelement; }elseHIDE_IMAGE(pelement);etc.

Thanks Bill, I am going to try this method on one gauge if see if it works for me. If so then I will have th huge 'fun' of changing all my gauges :-(

>Thanks Bill, I am going to try this method on one gauge if>see if it works for me. If so then I will have th huge 'fun'>of changing all my gauges :-(Actually, once you've got two done, the rest become simpler to do...It took me a day and a half (about 14 hours) to complete 47 gauges...The nice thing about this technique is that it requires no additional bitmap resources, since the same resource id is used three times at worst case, and only once at best.If one really wanted to go crazy, a copy of the bitmap with a 'light effect' applied in Photoshop could be added, which would allow for five levels of lighting:off - .bmpdim - alternate .bmp w/ Luminousmed - alternate .bmp w/ Brightmed2 - .bmp w/ Luminousbright - .bmp w/ Bright

After some more experiments I seem (fingers crossed) to have got my old method working, not sure why though :-)Before I was doing the set bright and a set off screen, which only worked some of the time. Now I have this code which seems to work all the time, it's being called from the gauge pre update and not from a callback.void SetLitElements(int circuit, PELEMENT_HEADER list, int num){ LightSystem* pLightSystem = Systems::GetLightSystem(); bool bright = false; if(pLightSystem != NULL) { bright = pLightSystem->GetLightCircuitState(circuit); } for(int i=0; i