Red Lion Popup, dim the background?

I'm using Crimson 3.0 build 640.001 to program a G308. My original design had a LOT of stuff on it and was hard for older eyes to read, so I made it all bigger. Unfortunately, there isn't room for everything. Some stuff I was able to move/consolidate. Some buttons, I put on another display that I'm opening as a popup on top of the main display. I would like to "dim" the main display while the popup is active, to emphasize to the user that those controls are inactive. As it is, they're still full brightness and it's easy to think that they should work when they don't. Is there a way to do this?

Thanks!

You might try giving Red Lion a call, but I don't think that you can do this. Crimson doesn't support transparency and the only dimming ability I know of is for the whole screen.

I contacted Red Lion support. It looks like this isn't possible.

Ooh I like that idea! Lot's of times the operator doesn't close the popup and can't figure out why nothing else works.

Why not technically dimming the rest of the screen, how about changing the background color to a dimmer color before showing a popup?

Hmmm.....there's an idea. I would have to change my background color since I usually just use black. Can't get much dimmer than that....

I don't know that it's as much a dimmer color as it needs to be a color that is closer to your text color to give the appearance of being dimmer. I'm going to do some experimenting this evening with it. I'll let you know what I come up with

If you are bound and determined to get the appearance of "dimming", you could alter the colors of the objects on the main page to make them select other darker colors when the pop up is visible.

This might get hairy if you are already doing things with multiple colors and could end up being a lot of work. Is there any reason you could not make the popup bigger (cover almost everything) or does the operator really need to see stuff on the main page while the popup is open?

Does red lion allow for transparency? You could overlay a semi transparent layer of the things you want to dim?

Transparency was my first thought, include on the popup display a 50% transparent rectangle covering the whole screen. Red Lion doesn't support transparency, though.

It would be nice to see a few things on the main display, but I can just copy them onto the display I'm opening as a popup and just have that one open as a normal display. I kind of like the idea of a popup, though. I think a popup that entirely covers the entire display is usually kind of a waste, though. Might as well just open a new display. Unless you're doing some sort of scripting and such that needs that display to still be open. Or something like that.

The controls I want on the popup aren't nearly enough to need a display of their own but they're too much to fit in the available space on the existing display, hence using the popup. I'll probably just end up having it open the display the normal way instead of as a popup and just have a bunch of blank space. That will mean more copy-paste work whenever I change stuff in the future, but I'm already doing some of that anyway.

There are enough objects on the display that changing the color of each one would be a royal pain in the neck at this stage, even though most of them are simple, constant colors. It wouldn't be impossible, but would be a pain.

Ok I had to get some help from Justin from Red Lion but I have a working demo that does what I would like and what I think Joe is looking for.

You can't use the screen background color to do this but you can make an object the size of the screen and link it's color to a tag. In the case of this sample program, the tag is "BackgroundColor" with 0 being blue and 1 being gray. I have a popup that shows when you click the popup button. The properties of the popup screen I have added actions of "On select" BackgroundColor=1 and "On remove" BackgroundColor=0. Clicking it turns the "background" to gray. You can still see the clock running at the bottom yet the focus is on the blue.

Also the attached sample works in the emulator so you can test without a screen.
http://www.plctalk.net/qanda/attachment.php?attachmentid=38536&stc=1&d=1444922505

Actually, I think I kind of like that....

I'll find a background color that doesn't make things too awful to read.

Ok, so I played with it some. Unfortunately, I have all of my other screen objects colored to look right with a black background. Changing to another color didn't work well for what I have already, but I'll try to tinker with it when I get a chance. Maybe build it into my next project from scratch.

Thanks for the tip! And for hunting it down with Red Lion.

Glad it helped. It helps us polish our code by bouncing it off of each other.

TWC: Nice idea and code post.

If you want to take Tim's idea a step further, you can also control the colors of the active elements on the screen. See attached mockup. Should run in emulate.