Winique

[Plague]

yo, I'm digging this skin up from the grave.
I've talked with lunarboy1 (original author), and have gotten the ok to take over the project.

If you remember the skin, you know that the project got cancelled because of broken regions for components.
I have now been able to get the wanted effect without using those regions, but instead using a little hack, similar to a hack found in Invicta for another reason.
If you don't remember this skin, it's basically a winamp port of the default Sonique v1 interface.

Progress on this will initially be slow, as I have the Stargate project to finish up first, plus some important schoolwork. But after those are done, progress should speed up on this one.

What I'd like to know now, is if there's anyone who knows where I can get ahold of the original Sonique v1 interface?
I have searched everywhere, but it seems like the skin is only distributed inside the Sonique.exe file or something.

If anyone have an extracted copy of the skin, or knows where I can find the skin, I'd very much like to know..

I'll post a screenshot of the current status of the skin.

[hammerhead]

good luck

[Mr Jones]

Yeah, best of luck with that one, I remember picking apart some of the source code on that skin to see how to do a shaped avs window for a skin I was planning, was going great right up until the region thing got broke and never fixed again, mind you it did make for a hell of funky skin if you did try and use it hehe

[Plague]

thanks guys..

now if only I could get my hands on the original default sonique v1 skin... making this thing from screenshots will be a major headache...

[Naamloos]

let me see, i think i've worked on this along with lunarboy, and did the avs. Or helped him with it. Let me see if i have it somewhere on backup

[Plague]

naamloos, lunarboy1 has sent me what he had, but he made this from screenshots.. So if you have the original sonique skin, then it would be awesome.

[Naamloos]

nope, havent got anything (no winamp skin, nor the sonique)

[Mr Jones]

I have sonique 1.63 that has that skin as the default, it was on a cover disc of some japanese mag that I had a skin published in 5 years ago

I can send you the exe if you want to install it, you could screen grab it from that.

On the other hand, if you can work out how to open a sonique skin file (.sgf) then you would only need 288kb, but I can't figure it for love nor money.


Let me know.

[Plague]

Jones,

I have the latest available Sonique installed already, but there's no skin in the skins directory. Is the default skin located somewhere else?

If you want to send me the sgf file, then that would be great.

[Mr Jones]

It's located in the sonique/system directory I believe , it's called sonique.sgf

However I have no idea how you open it up to get at the files inside, I found the old sonique skin creator plugin that will open the file and show you what's inside, but not how to extract any of the files.

[biggman15]

I haven't tested it.... But I found a utility that claims to be able to Extract those Skin formats....
http://www.zipzag.com/
I hope that will work....

[Mr Jones]

It does, good find...

Here is the skin, had to split it over two archives, even with all the .rgn files and what have you taken out it was still too big.

[Mr Jones]

part2

[biggman15]

Cool..... Google Finds Everything.....

[Mr Jones]

I Must have been asking it the wrong question last night then

[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

[leechbite]

maybe a little trick and maki can do it.
make two bitmap fonts, one for the uppercase and the other for the lowercase. then make 2 songticker on the same location, 1 for the upper and the other for the lower. then for the uppercase ticker, replace all the lowercase character with a space and vise versa for the lowercase ticker.
a bit too much to do for a simple font but might work if you really need a bitmap font where shades, glow or other special effects are needed in the text.

[Plague]

leechbite, I think that could work, but that would require some heavy maki scripting, and would probably be killer on the cpu.. seems a little overkill..

I think I'll just stick with ttf instead.. Arial Black is pretty similar to the sonique font, and I think I'll use regular Arial where they use the smallest sonique font, like in the small mode songticker..

Anyways, I have another question:

I'm trying to make a custom XUI button that instead of image, hoverimage and downimage, has color, hovercolor and downcolor. As in, the button is just a textfield, that changes color depending on it's state, but it should still function exactly like a button.
I'm thinking combining a button and a textfield in an XUI object, however I haven't gotten the colorswitching to work like it should yet.. Anyone have any suggestions?

[leechbite]

one option is use a RECT object as a base for your button so you can change the color with setXMLParam("color","R,G,B"); the actual button will be transparent on top of the rect. it will be maki heavy if you do it in a XUI though.

[Plague]

the buttongfx itself is not the issue, I actually don't want any button gfx at all, just the text. So I'll do a transparent button with rectrgn=1 and put a ghosted text on top of that, with some sort of maki for controlling the text color. However, I haven't gotten that to work properly.

[leechbite]

i modified Anunaki's xui-button script to make it do what you described (it was very similar). the script was not tested nor compiled, so there could be some bugs/typos.

PHP Code:


Global group ButtonGroup;
Global guiobject realButton;
Global text buttonText;
Global boolean mouseOver;

Global string color, downColor, hoverColor;

System.onScriptLoaded() {
  ButtonGroup = getScriptGroup();

  realButton = buttonGroup.getObject("real.button");
  buttonText = buttonGroup.getObject("button.text");

  mouseOver = 0;
}

System.onScriptUnloading() {
  realButton = NULL;  // clears all events
}

realButton.onLeftButtonDown(int x, int y) {
  buttonText.setXMLParam("color",downcolor);
}

realButton.onLeftButtonUp(int x, int y) {
  if (mouseOver)
    buttonText.setXMLParam("color",hovercolor);
  else
    buttonText.setXMLParam("color", color);
}

realButton.onEnterArea() {
  mouseOver = 1;
  buttonText.setXMLParam("color",hovercolor);
}

realButton.onLeaveArea() {
  mouseOver = 0;
  buttonText.setXMLParam("color", color);
}

System.onSetXuiParam(String param, String value) {
  param = system.strlower(param);
  if (param=="text") {
    buttonText.setText(value);
  } else if (param=="color") {
    color = value;
    buttonText.setXMLParam("color", color);
  } else if (param=="hovercolor") {
    hoverColor = value;
  } else if (param=="downcolor") {
    downColor = value;
  }
} 


hope this helps.

[Plague]

yea, that looks pretty similar to what I did..
However, that didn't work, because for some reason, the color variables never kept their values.
The way I finally solved it, was to have two textfields, one for normal state and one for active state (I'm using active state for hover, down and active) and then just give them their separate colors directly in onSetXuiParam, no variables involved..
It works, but it would've been nice to get rid of one of the textfields, but since I reduced it to two fields, instead of three or four, it's not really a biggie imo..

[Plague]

yo, I know it's been long, but I also said development would be slow..
Anyhow, just so you don't think I've abandoned this, I've decided to upload a snapshot of it's current status.
It's almost done really, some finishing touches here and there, etc.
So I thought this would be a good time to do some beta testing and so on..

Some problem areas I still have are:

• need some solution for track number in nav mode, need to somehow display more than 999. (Original Sonique does an underline when more than 999, but I kinda think that "solution" sucks)
• need some solution for mid mode vis, right now it only works if you first first turn it on in nav mode (don't know why it behaves like that but it has to do with whether the vis wnd is dynamic or not). dynamic=0 works good in navmode but not in midmode, while dynamic=1 is the complete opposite. This is a big problem area.
• need some idea for mid mode songticker and infoline.. (wrap=1 doesn't work, seems broken)
• need some idea for nav mode drawer shadow.. (in original Sonique, the EQ drawer has a shadow at the top, but the bottom part of the drawer covers it, I need a good way to do that without having to make two drawers. You need to see it to know what I mean)
• need some idea for visswitching in mid mode when ext vis is running.. (since the ext vis is a component, it cannot be covered by anything without cutting holes in it and fake the cover. but the vis switch box is animated and shouldnt cover the vis all the time, only on mouseover and I'm having problems detecting that properly, it works sometimes and sometimes not)

If any other bugs are found, I'd be happy to hear about them.
Same with any ideas you might have.

note about the link:
I'm not sure how long it'll be available, coz I'm borrowing it from my brother, but it should last a couple of weeks atleast.. I hope..

Winique-2005-09-26

[Naamloos]

Damn, this is good!

the volume knob is going easily past 100%, not sure if this is correct?

And it keeps eating my CPU! (99%, barton 3000+ with 1 gig o ram) Switching to classic makes winamp.exe use 0%

[QuadHeliX]

So Sweet! I used to use this skin all the time. emm the memories. Thanks Plague!

[leechbite]

nice work Plague. cool animations.

need some solution for track number in nav mode, need to somehow display more than 999. (Original Sonique does an underline when more than 999, but I kinda think that "solution" sucks)

how bout make it auto resize the font to it fits 4 or 5 digits when needed.

need some solution for mid mode vis, right now it only works if you first first turn it on in nav mode (don't know why it behaves like that but it has to do with whether the vis wnd is dynamic or not). dynamic=0 works good in navmode but not in midmode, while dynamic=1 is the complete opposite. This is a big problem area.

normally i would use dynamic=1 but as i can see in the XML that you used WindowHolder to define the AVS layout so the avs component is dynamic in a sense. i dont see the source scripts so i cant experiment on it but it could just be timing. any way the source scripts be published? maybe everybody could have a poke at it.

also, maybe use bitmap font for the timers. bitmap performs a lot better on a fast changing timers that ttfs. (had same issue with Kameleon, i had ttf fonts with the msec timers before i had 40-50% cpu then i switched to bitmap font it dropped to 7-8%.)

anyway, just my thoughts. great work again.