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1

Window / Linux: occasional white bar on top of fullscreen window

« on: November 21, 2023, 11:09:32 am »

Dear all!
For some time, I've been wrestling with an annoying bug when running my SFML Program on Linux. When switching to fullscreen mode, I do at times get a white bar at the top of the screen. I have seen one bug report which has similar content: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/mutter/-/issues/2937
I tried every trick I could think of to find the place where things go wrong, but came to conclude that the windowing system messes with the window 'from the outside', because I do get Resize events with the wrong size (desktop height minus the white bar) without having triggered anything along these lines - the window is created with Fullscreen style. I use the Resize event to 'notice' that the bug is happening (it only occurs occasionally) and then I immediately re-create the window with fullscreen style. Usually one detect-recreate cycle is enough, but at times, the system is 'obstinate' and sends a few wrong Resize events before yielding to my re-creates. This produces a bit of flicker, but at least the erroneous state does not persist. I post here in case anyone else is having the same problem. Maybe my workaround can help, until there is a fix system-side which makes it unnecessary. Of course, a 'real' bug fix would be much appreciated!

This is the gist of my worlk-around code:

...
        if ( event.type == sf::Event::Resized )
        {
          auto window_size = p_window->getSize() ;

          if (    ui::run_fullscreen
               && ( window_size.y != desktop.height ) )
          {
             ui::p_screen->p_window->create ( desktop ,
                                      std::string ( "" ) ,
                                      sf::Style::Fullscreen ) ;
          }

2

General discussions / sRGB/RGB conversions

« on: September 12, 2022, 10:45:14 am »

Dear all!

I have just discovered that SFML can handle textures in linear RGB (I'll use 'LRGB' in this post, in contrast to SRGB). You may say this is old hat, but the capability is not glaringly obvious from the documentation. I'll reiterate what I have understood so far:

There are two components involved, the texture and the window. The texture may contain LRGB or SRGB data, and to tell the system which type of data the texture holds, you call sf::Texture::setSrgb() and you can inquire with sf::Texture::isSrgb() what the current state is. The second component is the window, and there it depends on the ContextSettings passed to the window's c'tor. The ContextSettings have a boolen field 'sRgbCapable'. You can pass true here if you want an SRGB-capable frame buffer, and false if you don't. AFAICT passing false will certainly succeed, but passing true may not succeed - you have to inquire about the state after creating the window to figure out what type of frame buffer you have.

Now let's assume you're working in LRGB. To offload LRGB to SRGB conversion to the GPU, you'd call setSrgb() with a false argument to tag the texture as holding LRGB data and work with an SRGB-capable frame buffer. If the latter can't be had (or the window was deliberately created without SRGB capability), you have to 'manually' convert your data to SRGB on the CPU before storing it to the texture.

I assume that passing in LRGB data should be preferable: first, the time to convert the texture data to LRGB (which is used by the GPU) is saved, and second, since the texture data is quantized to 8 bits already, doing the conversion from SRGB to LRGB will produce loss of image quality. Is this assumption correct?

How about transparency? Is the alpha value processed as-is, regardless of the texture's property?

I'm processing photographic images, SRGB/LRGB is an issue for me - in fact, my data are initially in single precision float LRGB, and I'd be happy if I could offload the float-to-uchar conversion to the GPU as well. Is there a way to do that simply with SFML? And if not, maybe this would make a nice new feature?

3

Feature requests / crossfading images

« on: June 30, 2020, 10:16:38 am »

I'm using SFML to write an image viewer. I'd like a simple way to crossfade from the current image to the next one. I haven't found a way to do this with SFML yet - if there is one, please let me know! I have the images as textures on the GPU and I'd like to use the GPU to produce the effect.

I think the simplest way to do this is to draw the new texture on top of the old one several times, increasing the new frame's alpha values every time until it's fully opaque, but touching every single pixel with the CPU just for that is too expensive. What I'd like is a function to globally change the transparency of a complete texture, or a blending mode to the same effect. I suppose this would be easy to do with a fragment shader, but I haven't worked with shaders so far and I'd prefer a simple prefabricated solution.

Kay

4

Feature requests / query the system's current FPS setting

« on: April 25, 2017, 10:43:59 am »

Hi group!

I'm looking for a portable way to query the FPS (frames per second) setting of the system my SFML program is running on. So I am *not* looking for a way to measure how many FPS my program is producing, but I want the currently active setting for the display driver. My program is driven by the vertical sync and can adapt it's computational load to produce frames faster or slower, but to get an idea how much time it has to produce a frame, it should know what the system is expecting: If the graphics unit feeds 60 FPS to the monitor, my time budget to render a frame is obviously smaller than it is when it's using 50 or even 30 FPS if I want to supply it with frames at the currently set rate.

While there may be ways to get the information via the system settings, I'd like to do a query from *inside* my program which will work on all systems SFML supports, so that it's portable. I suspect the information should not be too hard to extract - ideally I'd like it to be incorporated, for example, into the sf::VideoMode structure, or to be returned by a simple getter function.