Skinning Tutorial

[Kevl]

Hi

AM in the process of creating a new skin. Nothing fancy.

I started with blueskin and am in the process of making it into a meedio clone.

Wonder if anyone can advise me how to set the transparency property of the buttons in the main menu. I have set the button to be invisble under non selected buttons (set fillcolour = transparent) and orange on the selected button. But on the selected button I can see through the orange colour to the background below. How do I make my orange button opaque?

Kev

[sub]

Wonder if anyone can advise me how to set the transparency property of the buttons in the main menu. I have set the button to be invisble under non selected buttons (set fillcolour = transparent) and orange on the selected button. But on the selected button I can see through the orange colour to the background below. How do I make my orange button opaque?

You can set this in the next release.

[Kevl]

Many thanks.


Kev

[Kevl]

Hi,

Have meedio clone looking quite good now. Only took a couple of hours of experimenting.

How are the colours defined?

I have looked in various skin.xml files and colours are named e.g. orange

Where is the colour orange defined as RGB values etc.

Is there a list of available colours somewhere.

As I have seen mentioned elsewhere, the fonts look very ragged on my screen. Much more so than in the meedio screen I have been stealing bits from. I have set the background res to 720 x 540 (same as meedio uses) in the hope that this would tidy fonts up. Have switched off cleartype smoothing and this helped but they are still not as crisp as ought to be possible. I think meedio uses a scaling stunt to get sharp fonts. Seem to remember reading in one of their skin files some info about fonts being specified as much larger than they are required to be and then they are scaled down when drawn on the screen. They end up looking very crisp.

Is this something you are looking at for later releases?


Kev

[sub]

Standard .net colours are listed here: http://forums.nextpvr.com/showthread.php...ght=salmon

You can use RGB colours by starting with #, e.g. "#112244"

[reboot]

Here are the named colours, with their corresponding hex value, and approximate viewed colour (on your monitor):
http://www.w3schools.com/html/html_colornames.asp

[Kevl]

many thanks.

This thread will soon have enough info to be copied into the wiki.

Kev

[blader_se]

This thread will soon have enough info to be copied into the wiki.

I have no skinning experince, so please feel free to copy the good stuff...

[Kevl]

How do I make my orange button opaque?.

You can set this in the next release.

Are the fonts which appear on the main menu also subject to the same transparency setting that affects the orange button?

If so is the transparency setting affecting the clarity of the fonts displayed (as mentioned before) and is the ability to set this transparency setting likely to clean up the fonts in next release?

Kev

[sub]

In the current version, everything is drawn fully opaque on to a fully transparent image, and then at the last minute step is drawn onto the background image at about 80% opaque (20% transparent).

The only change in the next release is to control this current 80% value.

and is the ability to set this transparency setting likely to clean up the fonts in next release?

The fonts look fine to me. If you're finding them fuzzy, its probably because youre viewing anti-aliased fonts on a 720x480 skin zoomed quite a bit. If you create a skin for same resolution as your monitor resolution it'll likely look better.