I have a very talented photoshop guy on board to handle the skin for my CEGUI game. He is a bit too talented actually. He drew me up a skin that includes drop shadows on the windows. A very nice touch actually.
I couldn't find any information on this in the forums and it was clear that CEGUI didn't natively support such a thing... so I got to thinking. I like rigging up alaborate over the top ways to do simple things, so this is what I did:
The Solution:
I created child windows in my FrameWindow and set the edges off of the screen, then disabled the object and made it's disabled state imagery that of the drop shadow. I did this because disabled objects are not there when considering hit areas. I created as many as was needed and aligned them such that they make a smooth drop shadow around the left and bottom of the FrameWindow.
The Side Effect:
When you roll up a window, the shadow stays where it is. I guess there is a way to capture a rollup or rolldown event for any window globally and add some code to hide/show the shadows for the FrameWindow and the Titlebar, but I don't know how just yet. If anyone has a pointer or two, I'd listen.
The Question:
My question is (other than those posed above) has anyone else found a different/better way to do this? or is there some major flaw in this way that I have not noticed yet?
The Screen Shot:
