Background grafic enhancement

Xanatandor · Post by **Xanatandor** » Mon Jan 30, 2006 9:17 am

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

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:

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:

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

TIA,
Stefan

Halifax--lad · Post by **Halifax--lad** » Mon Jan 30, 2006 6:16 pm

I like that idea I suppost it depends how hard it is to make the changes

Post by **Neil** » Mon Jan 30, 2006 7:42 pm

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 · Post by **Xanatandor** » Tue Jan 31, 2006 9:58 am

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

Thanks again,
Stefan