Firebreath plugin drawing circles

Question

I'm pretty new to using firebreath, but I've managed to build this plugin for eyetracking. I need to calibrate my data, here i need to get the plugin to show/display/draw figures (circles) on top of the HTML page. I have no experience in display or drawing with c++ or firebreath.

I've read about there is different methods whether I have a windowless plugin or not. I don't know if my plugin is windowless. Also read about Direct2D but didn't manage to display anything. Furthermore, I looked into 'Drawing on Windows' (http://colonelpanic.net/2010/11/firebreath-tips-drawing-on-windows/) but able to get the gist of it when taking about HWND, which i guess is most important part.

How can i display one or more circles on top of a html page with my firebreath plugin? If possible i would really appriciate explicit examples and explations

I hope you can help, maybe is the problem something elementary.

Answer 1

You said you are drawing over the html page -- that implies that you are specifically concerned about seeing the html page under the plugin. If you use the plugin to draw, that means you have to use a windowless plugin -- windowed plugins cannot have transparent backgrounds. I'm not actually certain that all windowless plugins can even have transparent backgrounds, in fact.

Keep in mind that if the plugin is drawing over the page, that means the element is floating over the page as well -- which means you can't interact with the page. You'll basically need to handle the RefreshEvent and get the hDC from the PluginWindow and then draw using that, but as I said I don't know if it will actually work or be consistent or not.

If I were you I'd try to find a way to draw using html -- floating transparent images, for example -- and just use the plugin to do the eye tracking stuff.