Thank you all, but i still don't really get it
I don't want to slice the panel or set a different angle or anything like that.
So, Jaeger, your solution sounds very nice, but i'm afraid i've never used tga's before. I figured, in paint shop pro, i can set the background to 'transparent'. But when i tried that, and used it in my code, it still doesn't work.

BTW. the code i use is the following:

Is that too simple, or should that just be it?

Again, i don't exactly know how to use tga's. I'm using Jasc Paint Shop Pro.

If it isnt working, try inverting the transarency channel back in photoshop
and try it again...
That gives me headaches all the time...

I dont think that the mouse detects if a button is transparent or not. At least this does not work with TGA and A7, the full button image area is always detected.

When you want to detect only transparent parts, you need to read the button image and find the pixel at the mouse position. If that is transparent the button function can just return and do nothing.

I would put another button on top (that is exactly the same), rotate to 45 degrees, and only activate the function when both buttons are pressed. This will make the active shape an octogon instead of a square, which is very close to a circle. here's a quick photoshop showing this theory:

See how they overlap? it's almost a circle.

If that doesn't work, you can make up your own button function using sin and cos to make a perfect circle as the detective radius.

Hmmm... Sorry. This actually ISN'T as easy as I made it sound. There's a trick to it. But you won't have to do a bunch of crazy stuff. I thought it was so simple because of the way I have been doing this in different projects, with my own code. But, I'm going to show you some code you can use. You'll have to give me a little while to dig through my projects and find the usable stuff. My full code is huge, so I've gotta dissect it.

Sorry to have run my mouth too quick! :P

P.S. @ the_mehmaster - As far as I know, that won't work. You can't push two buttons at once, nor have one over the other and have them both work...

Oh, that's how I did it... I used pixel_for_bmap to get the pixel of the button that the mouse was over, then used pixel_to_vec to see if it was over a transparent part. I copied and pasted that bit into other projects, so it seemed to me like it worked that way by default, LOL!

I'll give you an example, so you can see it. It's easy...

But this is straight out the manual:

*Free-form buttons can be used when the button function retrieves the pixel at the mouse position through pixel_for_bmap(), and uses the pixel color or alpha value to determine whether the button was hit or not.

I'll show you code asap. I'm kinda busy atm... But there's still no need to "chop up" your buttons, or use windows, etc.

i was talking about the method on the Jaeger's last post, except, i just use panels and panel events for that and not the buttons.

@jaegar: sorry, i sometimes get confused between programming languages... this ended up being for blitz3d

Thanks again.
That pixel_for_bmap method sounds good.
I guess i can something out of it, but if you could find an example, it would be very nice.


Roy