Winique

[Plague]

cool! Thanks guys!

I must have been asking google the wrong questions too..
This should help considerably.

[Naamloos]

Originally posted by Mr Jones
I Must have been asking it the wrong question last night then

i bet you weren't asking any winique related stuff

[Plague]

alrighty then, progress.. yay

I couldn't help myself, I just had to work a bit on this thing, it's so fun
Mid and Small mode's are more or less done and working (minus a few small things, nothing major tho).
Both are pretty much rewritten from scratch and they both now use the original gfx from the default skin, not from some screenshot like before.

Some things I have came across that would be nice if they could work:

* wrap="1" doesnt seem to work for text fields, I kinda need this for the mid mode songticker. It's not critical, but would be nice.. so if anyone knows a way to make it work, please tell..

* I have gotten the playlist progress bar (the one surrounding the vis in mid mode, showing which track in the playlist is currently playing) working in both mid and small mode, however as far as I know, there's no way to select and play a file solely based on it's playlist location, correct?
I'd love to have that working, so if anyone knows a way, please tell..
If that can't be done, is it atleast possible to get the songname based on it's playlist location?

* The vis in mid mode obviously has limitations, one of them is that the vis-switch-box cannot be shown on top of the vis, unless it's made static and an area in the vis is cut out for it. I don't want it to be shown all the time, so I thought I could change the region on the vis whenever the mouse is hovering it.. It works, not so well.. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't and sometimes the region won't change back again when the mouse is leaving the area.. So, ideas here on what to do would be cool..
The vis is turned off when nothing is playing, so if no solution can be found it's no big deal, because the vis can be switched while nothing is playing.


Now, to bigger things, the Nav mode
Haven't begun on it yet, but it's no secret it will be the hardest thing in the skin to do, due to all of it's animations and ofcourse the vis and playlist editor that can be used in fullscreen there, behind everything else, etc.. Those things cannot be done, so I'll have to make a compromise there.. And I have a pretty good idea for that too.. Fun stuff

As for the standardframe, I came up with the idea of using the SkinMaker X skin, since it's made by the same guy and is the official skinmaker for sonique.
Should work fine. However, I think that skin is baked into the skinmaker exe, so that one I might have to do from screenshots.


Finally, a screenshot of the current progress, yay..

[Mr Jones]

Originally posted by Plague

However, I think that skin is baked into the skinmaker exe, so that one I might have to do from screenshots.

Couldn't you res hack the exe/dll and extract the bitmaps that way?

[Plague]

never done something like that, how do I do that?

edit: nevermind.. found it on google..

[Plague]

res hacking the skinmaker exe didn't work..
It looks like it's hack-proof, it even has a message to hackers: "HACKERS_GET_LOST"
So, if anyone wanna give it a go, be my guest..

[Mr Jones]

Had a bit of a look, there isn't much in the way of images in there, a few fonts, few buttons , the main frame and a load of generic icons that probably got imported from whatever coding studio was used to build the app, I've extracted the interesting bits, but like I say, nothing really that exciting...

[Plague]

perfect!

thanks man, I know there isn't much of interest in that exe, but whatever is missing there, I'll just grab from the rest of the sonique skin..

I'm not sure if I'm gonna use the fonts provided here and in the sonique skin, or not, as I kinda actually prefer using a truetype font instead of a bitmap font.. And having both (truetype as altfont) never works good, as the "y" value is always different between truetype and bitmap fonts for some reason..

What do you think, go bitmap or stay truetype?

[Mr Jones]

Bitmap all the way for me, way easier to work with in my opinion, when you want a font to be 8px high or something then that's exactly what you get with a bitmap font etc etc.

Plus it'll get your file size down somewhat if you don't include a huge .ttf in it.

Just gave sonique a bit of a work out here, good luck with that main window it's actually quite impressive in it's own way, lots of options and funky stuff in there.

I thought the song ticker on the medium mode was unique as well, have you manage to replicate that?, where it wraps the entire song tile to fit the small round window and then scrolls it up and down so you can see it all, very clever.

[Plague]

unfortunately, wrap doesn't work for some reason, so the only way I could do that, is by having multiple text fields and divide the text into those fields.. it's possible, but I'm not sure if it's worth it..

as for the font, I'm currently using arial black, which I like. It looks alot like the sonique font and so far I haven't had any size problems with it. and the ttf isn't that big either..
Plus, I noticed none of the Sonique fonts have big ÅÄÖ (swedish) letters, only small ones, and since I'm swedish and have some swedish songs, I'm kinda biased.. hehe..
However, I will look into the bitmap fonts and see if they will work out-of-the-box without too much change to the font file and skin xml.. if they look and work better than the ttf fonts, I will probably go bitmap.

However, I'm not only trying to replicate the sonique skin, I'm also improving it in areas where they, to be honest, screwed up. One such area is the mid-mode vis screen and the plprogress bar around it, where the vis area is defined by some kind of region (even in sonique), but that region is so badly done, the vis doesn't use all of the available space, and the plprogress bar is even worse, it 'leaks' into the vis area and out onto the main window background.. same with the round blue buttons...
I have redone that, and made it fit nicely, like it should've from the beginning..

So, if I come across more areas where I think I can make an improvement, I will..
After all, I want the skin to be usable, not just a replica..

Oh, and the grey shuttle thing (next to volume) on the mid mode was originally used for pitch in sonique, but they later changed it to a bad fastforward/rewind thingy. I'm not using it for either.. I tried with pitch, but pitch has been removed from the directsound output, or it was never available in winamp5 in the first place (it was there in wa3) so I'm instead using it for setting the crossfade time.

[Mr Jones]

I think pitch never made it across, I tried to do it in the K-Jofol skin when I updated it for WA5 and could never get it to work, gave it up as a bad job eventually it felt like I spent forever trying to get it working to no avail.

[hammerhead]

For fonts, try making a custom ticker.. just use layers for each char then put them in a group to scroll. I'm sure it's possible to do something like that in maki

[Plague]

yea, that's possible, but a little overkill..
The way I described earlier is much easier and has the same effect. Anyways, I'll see what I'll do, haven't decided yet..

[Plague]

Question:
Is it possible to have both uppercase and lowercase letters in a bitmap font?

So far, I have only seen either lower or upper, but not both.
If I'm to use the bitmap fonts used in the sonique skin, I need both upper and lowercase.
If this is not possible, then I'll use ttf instead.

[hammerhead]

Unfortunately not =/ one of the limitations