Starting a new skin

[chasef]

I know there're bits and pieces of answers to this scattered around the forums but I wanted to get a comprehensive answer. What's the best way to go about starting a new skin?

[reven]

start with the main features (recordings, tv guide, main menu etc). those have the most skin options, and will teach you the most. also make small changes, sometimes if you change a small thing and dont pick it up and continue that one error will cause the plugin or whatever not to show up and you have to start again. first things first thou is to get a nice background image, and if you got a pvr350 test what it looks like on that, some images dont display well on that.

[chasef]

No one happens to know if there's a good program out there for helping with this, do you?

See, what I want to do is make a shibby LCARS (Star Trek for those not in the know ) skin but I have little experience fussing with XML files and such >_<

[reven]

nah theres no skin helper program, the xml is really basic, all it really is, is image positions and sizes. sub has commented his skin.xml files quite well. just give it a go, its really quite basic.

[chasef]

When I'm designing the new buttons and such, I don't see the XML file actually pointing to any buttons anywhere. What's the deal?

[reven]

most are using composite images, this just allows you to draw a button image as code if you wish (sub does this in the blue skin). all you mainly have to do (some plugins are different, but most should follow the same layout) is design a focus button and a nonfocus button, and add
<DrawImage filename="image.jpg" loc="xpos,ypos" size="width,height"/>
where xpos is the xpos of the button image relative to its postioned, and same with ypos, width/height is the images width/height. you define the buttons positions in the specialelements tags. also usually define the spacing between each button. its a good idea to add 5 pixels to the button on surrounding the button. so make xpos =5, ypos=5 and width-10 height-10.
give it a go, just keep trying it until you get it right, small steps.

[chasef]

Is there an ALL CAPS tag for XML?

[reven]

huh? what do you mean? if you want to change buttons to caps, you would have to use the language.xml which you can translate a string to another string.
eg "Music Albums" to "My Music", but not every plugin looks for translations. think of xml as just a plain text file, its not a programming language, the program just reads this file for information (only information that it is expecting) so you cant just use tags here and there. thats why a lot of plugins arent very skinnable, the developers didnt accomodate for skinners.
xml is just a well formed text file basically, meaning every openning tag must be closed <name></name> etc. xml is just easier to check for these things than an plain text file, thats why it is used.

[chasef]

Perhaps this would be better addressed by sub: do you have a good XML resource (with a list of tags, etc.) that we can use?

[sub]

no, but all available features are currently used in the skins so you should be able to find examples of everything thats possible.