2021-05-17

Invisible wires …

It is possible now to have invisible wires.

Wire invisibilty is implemented as a special wire color (SC_INVISIBLE = -$7fffff, no idea why TColor has to be a signed entity in Delphi VCL …). This color can be selected from the connector right mouse popup menu as ‘invisible wire’. To make it visible again select any other color.

Invisible wires will not normally be drawn, but when it happens to be a wire that is not connected to an output it will be made visible anyway. Also when a connector is double clicked the wires attached to it will always light up, even when they are set to be invisible.

Then there is a new item in the Action menu ’show invisible wires’ which when activated will show the hidden wires in the same color as wires that are not connected to an output. The shortcut key assigned for this is ‘i’.

Visibility of invisible wires is not saved with the patch, nor is it saved in the program’s ini file. Visibility of wires is saved in the patch though, as the special ‘invisible color’.

Note that when you just want to temporarily hide all wires you can set the wire size to zero, or you can use ‘Ctrl+w’ to toggle visibility for all wires. These settings will not be saved with the patch.

2021-05-18: Changed the wire visibility a bit more. Unconnected wires will always be visible now regardless of wire thicknes and wire visibility. And when double clicking on a connector the wires connected to it will alwyas be made visible, regardless of wire thicknes and wire visibility.

Individual wires set to be invisible will not be shown though when showing invisible wires is used in case overall wire visibility is off or the thickness is set to zero.

Added wire cloak and de-cloak to the module popup menu for making all wires (outgoing as wel as incoming) for that module invisible; or visible again. It is a bit slow, but it will have to do.

Making wires visible from the module popup menu will change their color from SC_INVISIBLE (-$7fffff) to the default wire color.