Porting LH 5048 Aero Windows animation effect on Windows 7.

[hinatahyuuga]

Hi,

Sorry if my question is a bit light, but is there a way to reproduce the open/close animation
from LH 5048 on Windows 7? I always found that effect was great , and maybe we can
use it on W7..

Thank you

[Zv45Beta]

I think we would need to mess with DWM. That wouldn't be easy, nor would it be a very good port either...

[hinatahyuuga]

Maybe extract a part of the dwm code and and replace on 7 DWM ? But i dont knwo how to see where is located
.

[Wheatley]

Yes, because that sounds like a simple thing to do and totally not a waste of time. You can't just expect that it will in reality be as simple as you make it sound.

[Splitwirez]

I agree that it would be incredibly difficult...but IMO it'd be awesome if someone actually did it O.o

[yourepicfailure]

I can't remember, but the 54xx builds, and possible 55xx builds had slightly different animations. Those would have a far greater chance of success importing to RTM.

Don't even start with 7.

[hinatahyuuga]

It mean that is ..impossible? I dont remember about 55XX animation, for me was the same as Vista or 7 ^-^
We have no information about this? I mean where this animation is located, or witch file is used for that?

I remember for exemple a modification for windows 7 who change the text animation on explorer (fading down when appears) with GDI+ .

(sorry for my bad english).

[yourepicfailure]

I remember somewhere around RC1 or pre-rc1(54xx), the animations followed a parallelogram-like effect. The speed it ran gave the appearance of the window warping in or out of the taskbar.

The animations likely go into dwmapi.dll, dwm.exe, don't know off my head. Windows 7 had its dwm changed a bit from Vista, so it my not be possible.

[Zv45Beta]

I definitely think a big majority of Windows code is obfuscated, so decompilers are out of the game (and it's totally not a good thing).

The only option left is to use a disassembler, but the process of finding the animation code is so difficult it's a total waste of time.

All of this is, in my opinion, a non-achievable task which would, even if accomplished, lead into severe crashes (possibly even BSOD's).

Sure, it sounds like an easy task, but Longhorn is a trainwreck; buggy, resource-hungry and slow...

[hinatahyuuga]

I see... thats a shame u.u

[Melcher]

Offtopic Comment

I definitely think a big majority of Windows code is obfuscated, so decompilers are out of the game (and it's totally not a good thing).

That's not really how that works.. this is not about obfuscating. Windows is written in C and C++. These languages compile to machine code (i.e. assembly for the CPU you're compiling for). Once compiled, you cannot simply go back to the C or C++ that once was: only the assembly 'remains'. To make matters 'worse', compilers do all sort of smart things, that are really good in practice, but make the assembly you get out of disassembling harder to read. Moreover, all variable and function names (symbols) are gone after compiling since they do not affect how the program runs anyway. HexRays IDA has a plugin that does actually do a really good job at interpreting the disassembled code and generating pseudo C from it, but then again you'd be lacking all symbols making it extremely hard to find what you're looking for.

This is all in contrast to what happens when compiling a high-level language like Java or C#. These languages are compiled to an intermediate format (in an intermediate language). It's fairly simple to decompile the intermediate language to the original code.

Just wondering, would it be easier to find where the animations reside in a pre-reset Longhorn version? Where would be a good place to start looking in, to name a build.. 4074? I would guess the Aero animations would be stored in some DirectX format somewhere...