GBPVRSkinTools alpha

[gruskada]

Here's a very early start to what I hope will become a full-blown Windows forms application that easily lets you work with GBPVR skins (with a WYSIWYG editor, ideally).

For right now, however, it just lets you globally replace font sizes with bigger or smaller sizes (which hopefully will be useful for making high contrast versions of skins). On my to do list is to add a switch to let you specify either a percent increase or integer increase (it just does integer increases now).

Here is some output from the DOS Window from one of my latest tests:

C:\GBPVRSkinTools "C:\Program Files\devnz\gbpvr\skin\OlbiaHC" "test" 2
Replacing occurrences in C:\Program Files\devnz\gbpvr\skin\OlbiaHC\BaseSkin.xml
size 16 changed to size 18
size 16 changed to size 18
size 23 changed to size 25
size 16 changed to size 18
Replacing occurrences in C:\Program Files\devnz\gbpvr\skin\OlbiaHC\archive\Disk
Space Dialog skin.xml
size 14 changed to size 16
size 14 changed to size 16
size 14 changed to size 16
size 14 changed to size 16
size 14 changed to size 16
size 14 changed to size 16
size 14 changed to size 16
...

[ATTACHMENT NOT FOUND]

[ATTACHMENT NOT FOUND]

Be warned that this in an alpha version, so please backup your skin directory before using it!

gruskada

[gruskada]

I just realized that the scope of this is probably too broad, since the SIZE attribute is used (or could be used) for more than font sizes. I'll have to include the RegEx to make sure the start of the tag is a TextStyle, or I should just parse the XML and deal with it that way.

I'll try to post a re-write by Monday.

gruskada

[gruskada]

This seems to do the trick to make sure that the size is contained within a textstyle element:

<TextStyle .* size=\"([0-9]+)\"

I'm going to play around with parsing the XML later today or tomorrow to see if that's any quicker (not that this program is slow - I'm just a performance freak).

gruskada

[gruskada]

..and here's the new version that uses the new RegEx.

[ATTACHMENT NOT FOUND]

gruskada

[4zm4r3d02]

I tried this:

GBPVRSkinTools.exe "C:\Program Files\devnz\gbpvr\skin\Collection" ConvertFontSize -2

from the directory C:\Program Files\devnz\gbpvr, where I put the GBPVRSkinTools.exe program, and all I get is "invalid path".

:confused:

[gruskada]

I tried this:

GBPVRSkinTools.exe "C:\Program Files\devnz\gbpvr\skin\Collection" ConvertFontSize -2

from the directory C:\Program Files\devnz\gbpvr, where I put the GBPVRSkinTools.exe program, and all I get is "invalid path".

:confused:

I can't replicate this with the same setup as you (I renamed another skin Collection, though, as I don't have this one). Do you have the .NET 2.0 Framework? I can probably recompile it in 1.1 since I don't think I'm using any 2.0-specific code, but for now it require 2.0. However, I think it probably wouldn't run at all if you don't have this...

Also, the path looks fine, but just to make sure, you may want to try using DOS paste (copy the path from the Explorer Window where the skin is, click on the icon in the cmd window, choose "Edit --> Paste"). Make sure you leave off the trailing slash (like you initially did).

If it still doesn't work, I can download the "Collection" files, run it for you, and send it to you. Let me know.

gruskada

[gruskada]

Never mind. I left my debug code in there that specifies a bogus directory in the latest post. Will repost a new file in a minute.

gruskada

[gruskada]

Here's the new file. Now has a more helpful invalid path message as well:

[ATTACHMENT NOT FOUND]

gruskada

[4zm4r3d02]

Thanks. It works great now.

[gruskada]

Glad to hear it, 4zm4r3d02. Let me know if you think of any other tools you'd like to see.

I'm moving the technical discussion of the "how to make GBPVR prettier" thread over here...

Can you think of some features / goals? Ideas currently are:

• A file manger showing all skin.xml's the dev is working on.
  
• A common libary so the skin dev can just add a standard "button" skin to the skin (just need to supply the special element name).
  
• Common libary for textstyles / colors - this would make it easier to implement a style/theme for skin.
  

• Sub said he was adding more "eye candy" stuff for skinners. Depending on how this is implemented, and what effects can affect what elements, we could either capture this in the properties grid of the selected element, or have a Photoshop style "Effects" menu (if effects can be applied to all elements. Or depending on the complexity an options for each effect, we could have an "Element tasks" context menu off of each element where you could do element-specific modifications there. I'll wireframe this out so that it's a bit more clear.
  
• Also in the same style as Photoshop, we could have "layers", so you could easily arrange the z-index of each object.
  
• I don't have any other ideas right now, but I'll probably get some more as I'm wireframing. If all goes well, I'll post a wireframe tonight...
  

We should definitely prioritize these ideas, as we shouldn't bite off more than we can chew at the first go-around.

gruskada