Some Feature Thoughts

[RhinoTrip]

I came up with a small list of features that might be cool either as built-in options/functions or as something to be worked on by someone with more plug-in experience than I once the SDK is out. Most of these have to do with skinning, of course, but here they are:

o the ability to adjust color levels (RGB) of a particular image in a skin, like the gamma controls do for the whole player, from within a script. Also the ability to adjust the levels of a region of an image would be cool too, perhaps there might be some way to use the gamma .wac to do this. This would allow for on-the-fly manipulation of buttons, bg areas, and so on.

o the ability to directly pass objects from the skin xml to the script, especially integers. How and why and can't we do this already you ask? Well, imagine this scenario: a skinner who is great at graphics but doesn't know jack about scripting wants to make a skin. He beats himself up to learn the xml and then looks inside the script source and screams. All he wants to do is, say, set some simple predefined fading or wobbling behaviour like the "About" button in the default skin, but has a couple of layers he wants to do this. So he asks for my help, I write a script for him, but later he changes the number of wobbly layers. Now I have to edit his script again to load up the extra layers. It would be far easier if he could give his layers a name appended with a number like

code:
<layer id="wobbler1"... /> <layer id="wobbler2"... />

and then add a separate tag somewhere in the xml file:

code:
<passtoscript id="numberofwobblers" value="2"/>

This way the script could simply read the numberofwobblers and put them in an array, and then provide their behaviour in this way. See what I mean?

o edge blending - I thought it would be neat to have an attribute you can set for an layer that makes its edges (w/h determined by a paramter) semi-transparent along a gradient, the outer pixels being the most transparent. Again, there may be a way to do this in the script combining regions and setAlpha, but I'm not sure how it might be done.

o the ability to not only stretch layers but also to move them around from the script. I have a feeling this is already there and I haven't found it, or it's coming soon.

o predefined "wrap-around" animation would be neat, that is have a rectangular image animate by taking the leftmost pixels and adding them to the right-hand edge, then shifting everything over to the left (like a ticker). I feel like there is a way to do this with the regions, Francis, but I can't figure it out. I'm not sure what those integers I'm passing setRegionFromMap() are for, esp. the last one.

o the ability to add my own options to the standard right-click context menu. I bet there's a way to do this, but I just don't know what to load up in the script. Creating my own context menus is fine, but being able to add to the default one would be hip. Also more control over the rendering of the context menus in general, like the ability to place some text like a title, for example, under the checkmarks. At this point, the menu just repeats one background image which gets very, VERY messy if you try to do this.


Well, that's all for now, but those would make skinning a lot easier and potentially more fun. Cheers - RT