[Feature Request] Elliptical FXVideo Viewers and Sources

Elliptical FXVideo Viewers and Sources.

A lot of games use curves as well as squared edges. Using an Ellipse around a curved status indicator could allow the Viewers to be stacked on top of each other so your view could display the curved status of each Source stacked right beside one another.

A few examples (apologies if some of these aren't relevant anymore):
[WoW} IceHud: Provides a curved Health and Mana status indicator offset on either side of the centre of the UI. Elliptical FXVideo could have Sources stacked outward from the Viewer's own curved indicators.
[LOTRO] Hunter's Focus: A small curved bar above the "In Combat" indicator at the bottom of the screen. Elliptical FXVideo could have these stacked very neatly on the Viewer window, above the Viewer's own indicators.
[Most MMOs] The Minimap is typically round. This is mostly aesthetic, but hey, why not?

To expand on this idea:
A "Block Source" overlay which blocks a portion of another Source. Using the idea of Ellipses, you could place a Block Source Ellipse over a Source Ellipse to create a crescent-shaped Source. Without this, the above idea would still show an unwanted portion of the Ellipse. This would allow that to be eliminated.

[bob]

Interesting idea.

I'm not sure you could specify an ellipse up front as part of the source/viewer setup (drawing polygons is a PITA). Windows just doesn't do round windows. All windows are rectangles. When you are using Aero Peek (and VideoFX) it is basically doing a rectangle cut from an off screen buffer frame of one window handle and displaying it on another.

So to get an ellipse you have to fake it or draw it yourself. Windows can fake elliptical controls by providing an overlay, much like you said, and then have that overlay colour filled, and you then tell the renderer that a specific color should really be treated as transparent (actually, this is how it is achieved in XAML (ok yes you can actually draw a polygon too, but that is annoying and the draw surface is still a rectangle for which you need to set a transparency color), windows forms is a little more tricky, DirectX you just draw the polygon pixel by pixel). To do this with video FX, you would probably need to do it on a viewer. So rectangle source, rectangle viewer, overlay with a template specifying the transparency color.

Maybe it will become possible with ISBoxer2 if the VideoFX viewers are hosted in a XAML control.