Drawing on the desktop?

I found winamp rendering visualizations to the desktop pretty damn cool. How would I go about drawing to the desktop in blitzmax?

I was hoping it would be as simple as:

Local g:tgraphics = Desktop().CanvasGraphics() 
setgraphics(g)

but that doesn't work, and attachgraphics in wx doesn't seem to do the trick either.

Anyone suggestions?

I imagine it's more like a transparent window.

What Brucey said.

What would happen if you drew all over your user's desktop then your program crashed? ;) I guess drawing directly onto the desktop is possible, but you really shouldn't.

It actually draws behind the icons so if it's using transparency, it's doing it pretty damn efficiently :P

I suppose it 'might' be possible it's creating and setting an image for every frame, however even as slow as the visualization is, I can't see the putt-putt computer i'm on right now performing a process like that as quick as it is.

I'll look around the wx forums, maybe they have done something similar.



To be honest it's just something I want to play with personally on my non existant spare time. No plans to use it in any projects or anything.

You might be able to glean some info from the source of this:

https://sourceforge.net/projects/drempels/

Behind the desktop, I don't know... But there are some effects like splash screens, and other things.. Like the MS paperclip guy that comes out when you open MS word or something.