Skinning Tutorial

[Kevl]

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.

I set my experimental skin to be 720x540 so it is exactly 4:3 - and I get round circles (should I ever want round circles). Not sure if Im using antialiased fonts. My experimental skin uses the Tahoma font which is open type I think.

Will experiment with different fonts to see if it helps.


Kev

[sub]

Is you monitor set to 720x540? If so then you're most likely getting the best that you can get.

If you're running at 1280x1024, then a skin designed for 1280x1024 will have sharper fonts than one designed for 720x540 resized up to 1280x1024.

[Old Dog]

Is you monitor set to 720x540? If so then you're most likely getting the best that you can get.

If you're running at 1280x1024, then a skin designed for 1280x1024 will have sharper fonts than one designed for 720x540 resized up to 1280x1024.

There is something fundemental that I do not understand, please help.

Within a skin.xml file, I thought that coordinate 0,0 represented the top-left corner of the screen and that 719, 479 represented the bottom-right corner.

How do you design a screen for 1280x1024?

Thanks,
David

[sub]

You dont have to do it for all screens at once, but you can start editing some of the screens to change the size of the background image. For example, in the the main menu\skin.xml, you'd set something like.

<CompositeImage name="Background" size="1280,1024">

Of couse this would mean the menu buttons would appear in the top left portion of the screen, so you'd also need to look at moving the buttons and changing their sizes etc.

[Old Dog]

<CompositeImage name="Background" size="1280,1024">

Amazingly simple!

Thanks sub.

[Old Dog]

<CompositeImage name="Background" size="1280,1024">

But this leads to another question...

I think that font size is specified in points, not pixels. So how is the rendered size of a font (in pixels) determined?

[sub]

Yes, it uses point size. I dont understand what more you want to know about this.

[Old Dog]

Yes, it uses point size. I dont understand what more you want to know about this.

Say you had two displays, both physically the same size, but one is low resolution and the other is high resolution.

A 12pt font should appear the same size (physically) on both displays. This means that the font size in pixels for the low resolution displays is less than that for the high resolution display.

If the above paragraph is correct then, how is the font size in pixels determined?

[sub]

If the above paragraph is correct then, how is the font size in pixels determined?

GB-PVR doesnt do any internal conversion as the GDI+ libraries use point sizes for its fonts. What happens behind the scenes is unknown me, but I'm sure if you absolutely need to know you could probably find this info on the microsoft MSDN site.

My default blue skin assumes the user is running standard size fonts on a 96 DPI display. If you set large fonts, you'll get ugly results with fonts overflowing the bounds of buttons etc.

[Old Dog]

GB-PVR doesnt do any internal conversion as the GDI+ libraries use point sizes for its fonts. What happens behind the scenes is unknown me, but I'm sure if you absolutely need to know you could probably find this info on the microsoft MSDN site.

My default blue skin assumes the user is running standard size fonts on a 96 DPI display. If you set large fonts, you'll get ugly results with fonts overflowing the bounds of buttons etc.

Thanks sub, thats a good reply. When I get home, I'll experiment.

Thanks again,
David