Transparency Issue with Windows 7

[swordmaster2k]

Original Post: http://rpgtoolkit.net/community/discussion/44594/

I cannot get any color to be transparent in RPG Toolkit. It accurately lets me assign a color that is supposed to be transparent, but it doesn't actually render as transparent in the game. Is there anyone else having this issue? Is there any fix for it?

I haven't touched the animation editor since I upgraded to Windows 7, so I never noticed the problem until now. ( furyX639)

This issue has come up multiple times in the software forum, Euix commented on it and provided the following analysis:

This has to be some kind of issue with Windows 7, or a graphics card driver. Transparent animations and tiles do not work at all for me, although transparency works just fine when using RPGCode to draw images to the screen.

Looking through the source code, you'll find that Colin/Delano are using GDI for a large portion of the board/tile rendering engine. Interestingly, Microsoft made large modifications to GDI, which included hardware acceleration, and several bug fixes.

I didn't look through the engine too heavily in this regard, but the only other instance of transparency I can think of involves setting the device color key when rendering canvases and transparent images. In that case, it could be an issue with either DirectX or the graphics card itself.

I have a GeForce 9800GTX+ (basically a GTX260), and Windows 7 64-bit. On my hardware, transparency does not work for tiles/animations. Anything involving RPGCode appears to work just fine. All the problems point to GDI rather than DirectX or graphics card drivers, but I could be wrong.

I will definitely look into this; but honestly the graphics engine needs to be gutted and rewritten from scratch anyway. (Euix)

This seems to be a big issue especially when using off board graphics cards but it would probably be best to leave it till after a bug fix version as it could require substantial rewriting.

[KhinRunite]

I have experienced this personally and is actually one of the reasons I've decided to pick up development. I plan to look into this after the easier bugs are squashed.