Win2000 and older: Ugly dimmed icons

[MarcinW]

I'm not 100% sure if this is a bug, not by design, but:

Why do dimmed icons look so ugly on Windows 2000 and older? They are neither darker (which can be observed when using dark TC background color, for example blue) nor similar to icons shown in the Explorer (icons in the Explorer look nice, in TC are frayed)...

[Dalai]

I don't think it's by design. Probably some API functions are not available or Win2k doesn't fully support transparency, Alpha blending or 32 bit colors (for the tray icons it doesn't).

I don't see any advantage of using the new dimmed icons on Win2k, so I'd recommend to set IconLib=%COMMANDER_EXE% in wincmd.ini. And I wouldn't bother to put any extra effort into these old systems, even less when there are workarounds available.

Regards
Dalai

[MarcinW]

There must be some easy way of doing this, since Explorer uses it:

Code: Select all

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[ghisler(Author)]

Total Commander draws dimmed icons with
ImageList_DrawEx(...,CLR_NONE,RGB(255,255,255),
ILD_NORMAL | ILD_BLEND50);

Apparently ILD_BLEND50 was implemented differently on older Windows versions, probably for working with 16 color and 256 color palette display adapters: It seems to draw a checkerboard of the actual image and the RGB value to get the effect.

Any idea how to enhance that?

[MarcinW]

I think I have a piece of code that might help. I will search for it.

[MarcinW]

I made a research and the ability of drawing nice dimmed icons (without dithering) depends on two factors:
1) version of the COMCTL32.DLL library,
2) parameter given to the ImageList_Create API call (like ILC_COLORDDB, ILC_COLOR8 or ILC_COLOR32).

ad 1) Different COMCTL32.DLL versions come with different Windows and/or Internet Explorer versions (see here).

ad 2) All COMCTL32.DLL versions support up to 32-bit image color depth for image lists. But when painting with the ILD_BLEND50 parameter, painting - without dithering - is possible:
- for oldest COMCTL32.DLL versions (like in Windows 95): only for ILC_COLOR4 and ILC_COLOR8 image lists,
- for some more recent COMCTL32.DLL versions (like in Windows 2000): only for ILC_COLOR4, ILC_COLOR8 and ILC_COLOR16 image lists,
- for COMCTL32.DLL version 6.0 and above (like in Windows XP with manifested EXE): for ILC_COLOR4, ILC_COLOR8, ILC_COLOR16 and ILC_COLOR32 image lists.

Interestingly, ILC_COLOR24 image lists seem to not support blending without dithering at all.


The obvious result of having an 8-bit image list (ILC_COLOR8) is that high-color images look very ugly - regardless of using blending or not. Also a 16-bit image list doesn't give perfect results for true-color images.

So I think that the best solution would be:
- to use a standard image list painting function, like ImageList_DrawEx, when using COMCTL32.DLL version 6 or above; this solution will be compatible with any future Windows enhancements for image lists and will guarantee that painted images will be consistent with the Explorer,
- to use a custom painting function for older COMCTL32.DLL versions, that will handle blending for all image bit depths and without dithering.

Would be such a solution acceptable? If so, I think I could provide a function that will paint with blending.

Regards

[ghisler(Author)]

Thanks for your research! Currently I'm using a third solution: Just DISABLE blending on these old systems by default. TC 8.x didn't use blending, so when we keep it disabled, it will not disturb anyone...