Mala Custom

[drventure]

I'm working up a Mala theme for the cab I'm building and I'm running into a peculiar behavior.

I've created a background image at 1900x1200 (for a widescreen monitor) and set Mala in freescaling mode at 16:10 screen ratio.

All of that seems to work just fine.

Now, I've also shown one of the "Custom" image items and have set it to an image that is clipped directly from the backdrop.

But when the MalaLayout editor shows it, it's doubled in size. The only way I can get it to be sized properly is to shrink it to half (exactly) it's original size.

Of course when I do that and then run Mala, it appears to size UP the Custom1 image, so that visually, it is now exactly the right size, BUT it was scaled up from a half size image, so it's obviously blurred.

Anyone run into this kind of issue before?

Maybe I shouldn't be using such a High res background image? Like I said though, that part of it appears to work fine. It's just the Custom image that doesn't seem to size properly.

[system01]

Custom images take away the scalability.  Well, you can still scale, but with the results youve experienced.  Try using a definable image and assigning an image to it.

[drventure]

Ah, Thanks for the heads up. I'll give that a try.
Something I just noticed. MalaLayout appears to scale the background image down by exactly half when it'd large.

My 1920x1200 image, in MalaLayout scales down to 960x600, even though, in Mala, it displays full size.

But I'll give the definable image a shot

Thanks again!

[system01]

Well, again, you have the scaled option checked.  When a layout is scalable, all the objects are relative.  So it doesn't matter how scaled down it is, it will stretch all objects to what you have the FE set to.  If you change to a fixed scale of 1900 x 1200, youll see that the window becomes huge and youll prolly have to scroll a bit to keep the image and the menus visible on one screen.

Save before you change res.  If you have all your objects layed out all nice and are in scalable mode, and then switch to fixed res, all your objects will have to be resized and moved again to set them to an absolute position.

[drventure]

Right, but the problem seems to be that if I set Mala to scaled, it +does+ scale down the background, but it +does not+ scale down the custom images or definable images, so there's a mismatch. and this applies to both Mala and MalaLayout.

However, if I set a fixed scale of 1920x1200, yes, nothing scales and everything comes out at the proper size (but, you're right, I do have to do a little scrolling in the layout editor, not a big deal though).

I'm guessing I'll go with 1920x1200 fixed scale for now, since my target display is a 24" widescreen, although I seem to get a LOT of errors along these lines...

 
2009/03/11  15:40:35.40   Error: Object Class: TfrmMain, Object Function: DisplayInfo, Exception Class: EOutOfResources, Exception Message: Not enough storage is available to process this command.
2009/03/11  18:32:21.32   Error: Object Class: TfrmMain, Object Function: PlaySound, Exception Class: EOutOfResources, Exception Message: Not enough storage is available to process this command.
2009/03/12  00:28:15.25   Error: Object Class: TfrmMain, Object Function: DisplayInfo, Exception Class: EOutOfResources, Exception Message: Not enough storage is available to process this command.

But I don't get them consistently, though I do tend to get them much more often when I've got other applications loaded. Just for reference, this is a Core2 Duo with 4gb ram (but it's running Vista32, so I can't use quite the entire 4gb, but still....)


Also, I tried the definable image option but got the same results. Not sure if I did it right or not, but I didn't seem but one way to use them.

However, once I converted to Fixed size, those problems went away.

[drventure]

Just for posterity's sake (and in case anyone else runs into the same problem, and happens on this thread), It looks like the Mala "Out of Resources" problem was caused by my use of PNG's for some of the images (esp the background image).

I often use Fireworks for doing graphic stuff and it saves PNG files natively (but with all the layers etc saved in WITH the png image itself).

This is convenient when working with images, BUT it tends to create rather large PNGs.

And when you're talking about a 1920x1200 png to start with, I ended up with a 13mg background image

At any rate, I saved it as JPG and it shrunk to 400kb. Mala hasn't had any problems since...

[system01]

Now I'm a bit confused.

I just made up a modified standard.mll (scalable) with a definable image of a big red square in the middle.  I changed my monitor resolution all the way down to 800x600 and it still looked the same.

Are you talking about when you're in the editor, and you switch from scaled to fixed, things lose their relative position?

Have you tried, using the editor in scaled mode, creating your layout in a small window, then trying it in different 1.6 modes -- in the FE?