Jaggies on Clock Hands

It might be different Jim but can you use image files for the hand such as  png or bmp? I have noticed simalar with sysmetrix when I used the program to draw the hands. I had better luck with png hands.

I am using png files. Still getting jaggies. Tried adding blur, helped a little, not much.  Thanks JC.

hmmmmmmmm, you adding blur to the hand itself and are you using shadows? Just curious. 

Blur to the graphic. No shadowing. Tried shadowing to...no good.

If you're talking about straight line clock hands, I once used some glow of the same color of the clock hands to create a faux antialias/smoother edges. For a white clock, I had used a white glow, settings: Sharp=5 Darkness=1000 OffsetX=0 OffsetY=0.

eta: That's the built-in DX glow, not part of the image.

A little better, but it didn't completely do it.

Made the hand twice as thick too. I guess I could make it smaller, then add glow.

Anti/alias is supposed to cure that but from what I've seen, in smx anyway, is that when the hands move the image changes. In a straight line the pixels line up nicely but at angles greater or lesser than 45 degrees the pixels form a sort of irregular stair step which creates the jaggies. I never use the hands from smx, always create a .png for them. Works fine if the image is say 3 to 4 pixels wide but the second hand, 1 to 2 pixels wide always has jaggies as it moves. I've tried shadows but the shadow moves with the hand and doesn't maintain the proper lighting angle. I don't know of any work around for it.

I can't really tell if it's much of an improvement, but the current clock hand images being used are vertical or horizontal, and then DesktopX rotates them. What if you start with a diagonal image to begin with? It still has 'jaggies', but they look a bit different.

Combined with the 'shadow' feature it seems to look better still, but again, maybe isn't really that huge an improvement.

Or you could use a set of aliased hand images at various angles and swap them in depending on the angle of the hand. You might get away with using about 8 or so. If you were extreme, you could generate 360 images, and use one for each angle. If you have hand moving 'smoothly'...you'd need a few more....lol

I'm working on one that will eliminate the problem. No hands. lol

heheh karma for the best suggested solution

Jim has already done that: https://www.wincustomize.com/explore/desktopx_widgets/1759/

That clock had balls!

I think he just wants to talk about "jaggies" becaues they sound like "juggies", two of his favorite things.