Colorful

Last night I was thinking about colors when I left work and they were setting up green lights for the front of our building to celebrate the launch of Xbox 360.  So what can we do with colors in XML gauges in flight sim?

We ship a colors.doc in our SDK, but it's hard for me to imagine what the color "lavenderblush" (0xFF, 0xF0, 0xF5) looks like without actually going into Photoshop or Paint and trying it out.  So I created a little macro to fill a cell in the table with the appropriate color.  It looks like this.

These colors can be used to set the color of shapes (Ellipse, Rectangle, HorizontalLine, VerticalLine, Arc, Pie, Circle, Polyline, Polygon) and text in an XML gauge.

For example, for a rectangle, you might see something like:

    <Rectangle Width="54" Height="13" FillColor=" #7FFFD4" Bright="Yes" />

or:

    <Rectangle Width="54" Height="13" FillColor="Aquamarine" Bright="Yes" />

When a numeric value is specified, as in the first example, the format is #RRGGBB, or 8 bits each for red, green, and blue, in that order.

What attributes can use these color values?  For shapes, "FillColor" affects the fill of a shape; "Color" affects its outline.  For Text and FormattedText, "Color", "BackgroundColor" and "HighlightColor" both affect the appearance of the text on screen. 

Let me know if you have any questions on the topic of color!

Comments

• Anonymous
  December 25, 2005
  Hi,
  
  I coudn't make <Arc> work so far as indicated in the schema files. Does it have any special syntax not pubilshed?
  
  Thanks
  Tom
  
• Anonymous
  February 03, 2006
  What colours have special functions? For example,
  1 1 1 is used for masking bitmaps. Are there any other colours that are reserved for special functions?
  cheers
  Nick