[g7tommyb]

I have searched this forum for two days straight and have been still unable to find a coherent, concise, and complete post that addresses the issue of transparency of mutable images on Series 60 devices (I can get it to work on an emulator but don't really care about emulators).
There are many posts related to this, but most of them are disconnected and contradictory. Some people are convinced that they got the transparency issue on S60 resolved but they don't post the FULL solution explaining what they did and everybosy seems to be all over the place wrt the actual solution.
I would like to ask anyone that has got mutable images (i.e. creating several smaller images from one big png) to be transparent on an ACTUAL S60 device to please post a solution of how you got this working and put an end to this issue that seems to be coming up every few months.
There have also been people posting claiming that they have got this to work by using image arrays, instead of PNG images. In my case, however, I don't want to make serious code modifications and am not interested in using Image arrays, unless absolutely necessary.

On S40 I have been using DirectUtils.createImage(width, height, 0x00000000) and then drawing a part of my big image to this smaller mutable & transparent image. On S60, as documented by many of you, doing things this way does not preserve the transparency. What adjustments do I need to make to make this work on S60 devices?

I am hoping for a solution that is closer to my original work (i.e. uses PNGs and not image arrays) and not a complete re-write using image arrays. However, if a complete re-write is the only way to make this work, then I would like to see a solution using image arrays as well.

Essentially, anything concrete and useful would be very much appreciated.

Many Thanks!

=tom F.=

[shmoove]

I am hoping for a solution that is closer to my original work (i.e. uses PNGs and not image arrays) and not a complete re-write using image arrays.

Don't make smaller images out of a big one. Draw the big one with clipping. This might be slightly slower than drawing without clipping, but on Series 60 devices drawing speed is not an issue except in the most extreme of cases.

shmoove

[shmoove]

Or...
Pack the smaller images in the jar, instead of one big one. Again, since you're working on Series 60, you have a little more jar space to play around in.

shmoove

[g7tommyb]

shmoove,

Thanks a lot for your reply. These are good ideas, but…
Performance is an issue to me and I don't want to sacrifice any FPS. Jar file space is also an issue, since I have a lot of images inside composite pngs and separating them into a large number of small png images would be very inefficient and I would be sacrificing space, which I care about (still need to keep the app ~< 160kB).

Do you know of a solution to actually make this work on S60/ There has got to be a fairly simple way. I have played several J2ME games on s60, where composite images are being utilized to hold several image objects. They small image objects vreated from the larger ones retain their transparency. No doubt, Gameloft has a solution to this problem.

=Tom F.=