transparency problem....

[hipopony66]

Hey, I'm going to have scrolling text on top of a textured image in my program, so the area where the text is needs to be transparent so you can see through to image. Here's the problem:
Using the worthless (for scrolling anyway) label control, I get tons of flickering. Someone suggested I use a picture box, but here's the problem with that: If I put the same image as the background image in the picture box, then the patterns don't match up at all (remember, it's a textured image!). And, I didn't see anywhere to set a picturebox background to transparent. Sooo, my question is: What kind of control do I need to use to accomplish this? Is there an activeX control I can d/l to do this? I'd like to stay away from directx as someone before mentioned that would be overkill for my purposes. Any help is appreciated.

[PsychoMark]

Is the image tiled or not? How is the text scrolled, just from right to left again and again, is it bouncing, etcetera....

(just trying to collect some info before I start writing code )

[hipopony66]

text just scrolls from left to right, and, no, the image is not tiled. Thanks for any help you can give.

[PsychoMark]

(hopefully the next piece of code is bug-free, no VB here, sorry)



Drop a picturebox on your form.

Name: picBackground
Picture: Your background image
AutoSize: True
AutoRedraw: True
ScaleMode: vbPixels
Font: Whatever font you want to use


Also drop a timer on your form:

Name: tmrScroll
Interval: 100 (experiment with this, unfortunately, the timer practically won't go lower than 50, or 10 on Windows NT)
Enabled: True



In the General -> Declarations of your form:

Private lXPos As Long
Private Message As String

Form_Load:

Sub Form_Load()
  lXPos = picBackground.ScaleWidth
  Message = "Ain't that cute!"
End Sub

tmrScroll_Timer:

Sub tmrScroll_Timer()
  ' Move text (change -1 for faster movement)
  lXPos = lXPos - 1
 
  If lXPos < picBackground.TextWidth(Message) Then lXPos = picBackground.ScaleWidth
 
  ' Clear the picturebox
  picBackground.Cls
 
  ' Draw the text
  picBackground.CurrentX = lXPos
  picBackground.CurrentY = (picBackground.ScaleHeight - picBackground.TextHeight(Message)) / 2
  picBackground.Print(Message)
 
  ' Display changes
  picBackground.Refresh
End Sub

Now that's the non-API way, you could also replace CurrentX, CurrentY and Print with the TextOut API, but I don't know the declaration, and this should also work theoretically

Note that when you are going to use the API, ScaleMode has to be Pixels, so just in case I already let you set it

Hope that helps...