More flexible skinning capabilities

[goosey]

Oh dear - am at work now and it looked less bright on the laptop at home. It might need to be called "lemon" (scuse the pun). I will try and desaturate the backdrop a bit.

[Huw]

Something I learnt a while ago, don't choose colours on a laptop

[reven]

Quote[/b] (goosey @ Nov. 03 2004,13:24)]

Quote[/b] (reven @ Nov. 03 2004,06:38)]its green

Yes - that was the reaction from the wife too. In fact - I was just thinking that the colors are almost Australian - and we can't have that!  

No We CANT!!!

[sub]

Goosey, I'm just working may through the suggestions in this post and implementing the ones that aren't going to be a huge amount of work, but there is one I didn't quite understand. Can you please explain the following in more detail.

Quote[/b] ]
Also, net radio - you might want to move the display of the stations down as they overlap the line.

[fini]

I think that was a recommendation for me rather than you...

fini

[sub]

Ah good, one less thing to worry about

[goosey]

Yes - sorry, that was for fini - he asked what parts of his skin didn't look right.

I think that I understand the capabilities of the skinning a bit better now, and really what I would *like* to have changed is that any graphic part of the display (other than text) for all plugins be configureable (eg can use images or DrawRoundedRect etc) through the skin.xml.

In my test on the Net Radio plugin, not being able to change the rounded rectangles or colours behind the radio station items is pretty limiting. I assume (because I haven't yet investigated closely) that the same will apply to the comics plugin, and others - particularly plugins developed by others?

The only other issue I believe I have is with the resolution of GBPVR. Even in windowed mode it doesn't seem to display the background.jpg without stretching/distorting it. I think I posted this issue elsewhere, but I tried all sorts of resolutions and all of them were distorted in one way or another. Being able to define different resolutions would be nice, but even to master one would be good.

Anyway, I will try to limit skin change requests to ones that are simple to define and easy to change, and hopefully it will all come together in the end. Im just thinking that with all the plugins being developed it would be nice to get a solid standard that they could all adhere to so that all plugins can be made to look consistent.

[sub]

The skinHelper classes that I introduced a few months ago is pretty flexible, and allows for translations, composite images, definitions of fonts and colors etc. Unfortunatly there is still a fair amount of functionality (and plugins) that predates the skinHelper. I'm generally converting things over when I work in those areas, but its a big job and will happen progressively.

If the client portion (minus frame) of the window is exactly 720x480, then a 720x480 image shouldn't need to be to be resized. I'm just using the Microsoft GDI libraries to fill the window, and havn't noticed any funny distortions myself. That said, I'm not try to display thin horizontal black and white lines. In general GDI+ does a pretty good job of resizing images.

I wont be personally going and changing the plugins that are being made by others, but most of the new ones have more skinning options and are more consistant than earlier plugins. Again, the developer often finds it adds quite a bit of development time make everything configurable, so they often cut a few corners. If you find you need specific things changed in the plugins, just pipe up and hopefully the original developer will be able to make these changes.

[goosey]

Well this is the strange thing, the client portion doesn't appear to be 720x480. If you check out the size of the preview.jpg file that you supplied in the default "Blue" skin folder (and I presume which you took a screendump to create), it is 720x488. And when I have taken a screenshot and removed the window frame it is also 720x488. But even creating a graphic at 720x488 it still gets distorted.

Its beyond me why....but it s frustrating as it means that you can't create a detailed background and have it look really crisp.

[sub]

The window is whatever size you choose to make it. The default size in windowed mode is *close* to 720x480, but I wasn't actually trying to make it exactly 720x480. I could have just as easily made it 760x500. I honestly dont think anyone will be running their "production" system in window mode. The GB-PVR screen size is more than likely going to one of the standard full screen resolutions 800x600, 1024x768, 1280x1024, 850x480.

If you run it in window mode and make the window size exactly 720x480 (by draging the corner), or using a utility then it wont scale a 720x480 background.

Remember, if you run fullscreen your image will be resized from its actual size to whatever is required to fill the screen.