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Hello,

You may have ever wondered how to add some colour in your layouts.
The default background can be changed, but every empty space is set to the new colour. The default (green) background colour shows the layout in a fairytale style, so green that even the ecologists would have nothing to say. If you try to set the background into something else, like yellow, and you put some bushes and trees to your layout, you get a Middle-Eastern landscape.
Another way to change the background is to use a baclground file, with the price of a lower speed and great usage of memory and PC resources.

I would like to propose some other option, which may be able to solve the problem of flatness in Bahn layouts.
What if user could define regions having different background colours and a level of each region, so if they overlap, the background colour of the one with the highest level will be displayed ?
This could simulate topographic elements, like hills, mountains and even lakes or the sea, without having to fill huge areas with water elements.
Of course, the regions will be rectangular, but combinations of regions could simulate various shapes.
The display operation would be definitely faster than by using a background image. The regions definitions could be created with an external application and imported into Bahn via clipboard, having a text line for each region, in a format like:
<pre>X-start, Y-start, X-end, Y-end, colour, level</pre>

Greetings,
Trix

Hello,<table width="90%" cellspacing="1" cellpadding="3" border="0" align="center"><tr> <td><span class="genmed">Zitat:</span></td></tr><tr><td class="quote">What if user could define regions having different background colours and a level of each region, so if they overlap, the background colour of the one with the highest level will be displayed ? […] Of course, the regions will be rectangular, but combinations of regions could simulate various shapes.</tr></td></table>
but if you want to create a natural shape, you have to draw a lot of rectangles, up to one per tile if you want to do it really right. [img]icon_surprised.gif[/img] I don't believe that this would save much memory.

Of course, it would be nice to colour a great region of the background without having to fill it by hand … [img]icon_rolleyes.gif[/img]

The simpliest the method is, the lowest quality the graphic results are.
A solution is to draw a small number of rectangles to simulate a more complex shape, and fill the rest by hand.
A more complex solution is to give more co-ordinates and make a polygon instead of a rectangle.
There already is a sollution for filling water surfaces by hand: there are 9 graphic symbols for water, with which you can draw the edges of a huge area you want to be displayed as water (blue).
The problem is: what about other colours you want to use ?
A possible solution is a set of such graphics like the water graphics, where the useful part (like the blue for water) is drawn with the special colour code for the current background, whatever is that for an element on the layout, and the rest of the graphic is set to another special (not yet defined) colour code, corresponding to the background behind the current one, and if none, the layout's default background color. To avoid problems with existing graphic editors, this graphics could be implemented as standard graphics, and they would be displayed in the right colour depending on the current background and the background of a level below it.
In my opinion, this may be OK as speed, but definitely much better as memory usage. For instance, I'm currently working on a layout having a size of 4332 x 2719 elements at this moment. You may multiply this size with 32 x 16 x 4 and see how huge a bakground file covering this area would be. I'm telling you, it's 22G. I've got 2G on my computer !
I've just given you the idea. You may find it good or not good. The technical implementation, if it's possible and it worth, is up to Jan Bochmann. Maybe he will have an even better idea for this.