MAMEWorld Forums - EmuChat - Re: Nightly Build bug?

> Ewww...
>
> So let's take something simple like Pole Position... it has a marquee, a bezel, and a
> control panel. Just three things that sit "above" the screen.
>
> -- Some people might want to play using the entire artwork
> -- Some might want just the marquee and bezel
> -- Some might want just the control panel and bezel
> -- Some might want just the bezel
>
> Today... you just define the Main Artwork, and the user can make all of those choices
> on their own.
>
> So you're saying to keep that same adaptability, I would now have to define four
> separate views?

The Space Invaders cabinet model is over-stretched and doesn't fit the systems that benefit the most from interactive artwork. It's also unintuitive to build for because of the way it infers blending modes from element layers. For systems with elaborate front-panel controls, in practice people just assign things to layers and hack around until they get the result they want.

It's even over-stretched for arcade cabinets, hence needing to have the "alternate" mode hack where it uses different layer order and blending modes if a view contains multiple backdrop layer elements and no overlay elements. (This is necessary to allow Golly! Ghost! artwork without pre-matted background bitmaps with the current layer model.) It doesn't work at all for systems where you need additive mixing where screens aren't involved, e.g. LEDs behind translucent panels or diffusers or LEDs in combination with VFDs. It also doesn't deal with things like multiple LCDs stacked, where each screen needs RGB multiply blending mode.

You also get false bugs reported like Wellington Uemura reporting that a system without screens displayed nothing when he disabled all the artwork layers. Now you could argue that you should expect not to see anything if you disable all the layers, but it's unhelpful to be able to get MAME into a state where it opens a window with a zero-pixels-wide content area so you can't even see the on-screen UI. It shouldn't be too easy to completely break the user experience.

Also, you're always going to get less-than-ideal results if you allow enabling/disabling chunks of the artwork, because things won't re-tile. For example if you have bezel artwork that surrounds the display, and a marquee above that, disabling the bezel will leave blank space between the marquee and the screen and empty space on the sides of the screen. Same with control panels.

The effort to define additional views is a lot lower now that you can make reusable groups. See the internal artwork for et3400, intlc440, etc. The views require minimal markup, and the effects you see can't be duplicated by just enabling/disabling layers anyway.

For your example, you can make a group for each "area" of the artwork (marquee, bezel, control panel) and make views for combinations that make sense.