Background grafic enhancement

This forum provides an FAQ for users as well as allowing you to ask questions about MundayWeb's very popular BOINC stats services.
Post Reply
Xanatandor
New Member
Posts: 2
Joined: Mon Jan 30, 2006 8:41 am

Background grafic enhancement

Post by Xanatandor »

First , I want to thank you very much for this great service, it is really amazing 8)

I played with the background grafic feature and found, that the background image I provide is always scaled to the size of the resulting stats grafic. With this behaviour there are several issues: I cant predict the size of the resulting image (as I add more projects) and therefor the scaling of the image will vary, which results in some strange looking backdrops ;)

Second, the stats overlay the complete background image and isn't that useful for other purposes than some simple texture backgrounds.

What I would like to do is this: I want to provide a background image which is set up as a "painting canvas" like this one:
Image
I would like to be able to set an "anchor point" for the (transparent) stats texts (say the top-left corner, expanding to right and down), so the result would look like this:
Image

As far as I understand you have to make some changes to the way, the background image is supported: the background image itself has to define the size of the resulting image and there should be another setting in the "Your grafics" area/background image to set the anchor of the stats text.

I hope you understand, what I am talking about and it would be great if you consider to change it that way :wink:

TIA,
Stefan
Image
Halifax--lad
Established Member
Posts: 227
Joined: Sat Sep 10, 2005 11:27 pm

Post by Halifax--lad »

I like that idea I suppost it depends how hard it is to make the changes
Join us in Chat (see the forum) Click the Sig
Image
Neil
Site Admin
Posts: 1298
Joined: Mon Apr 18, 2005 8:35 pm
Location: UK
Contact:

Post by Neil »

Hi,

Welcome to the forums and I'm glad you like the services.

It's an interesting idea, but at first glance, it seems difficult to implement. Also, bandwidth is an issue with my site at the moment. It has the potential to increase my bandwidth usage.

I will keep the idea in mind though,

Neil.
Xanatandor
New Member
Posts: 2
Joined: Mon Jan 30, 2006 8:41 am

Post by Xanatandor »

Thanks for considering.

I'm afraid you are right, this has the potential of dramatically increase the needed bandwidth. I don't know how difficult it is to implement (having only very few PHP experience of my own, I recently stumpled over imagecopymerge and imagecopy), but I don't think a function exists, which lets the "clientside" merge the two pictures, so the issue with the bandwidth will have two sides: your server has to load the backdrop image from an URL (as long as you don't want to have an upload directory for each member) and after the merge/paint you have to serve the resulting image.

Well, hopefully you will get some sponsors and unlimited bandwidth, I think to solve the technical issue is more a kind of enjoyable challenge :wink:

Thanks again,
Stefan
Image
Post Reply