TMW GUI - skinning thread

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i
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TMW GUI - skinning thread

Post by i »

Lets see what we got in TMW. We got new splash screen, a bunch of new tiles and maps. And old GUI. So I was trying to change that, and found some potential problems for future skinners.
I start from slide bar, because old one IMO looked strange... Here is result:
Image
New slider is basing on Ubuntu Human's theme. Colors of bar are the same. Round button in new.
I also marked unused parts of image with green. Below I present this png at 800% zoom.
Image
Slider Map file:
Image
And legend:
Red - [4x6px] - begin and end of horizontal slidebar
Yellow - body of horizontal slidebar
Blue - [6x4px] - begin and end of vertical slide bar
Light blue - body of vertical slidebar
Black - slidebar button
Green - unused

I suggest to make map to every file used in GUI and place it on TMW.wiki.

Next I wanted to change borders of windows. But modifying thickborder.png won't worked and then I realize that we are using vscroll_gray.png instead of thickborder.png for scrolls and windows borders. And here is my question: Why?

That would be nice to have skinning tutorial and let people to make their own skins. Maybe skins should have XML files describing areas of element on image.

And one more thing. Please do not post thing like: "Yeah cool", "great job", etc. Only constructive posts will be appreciated.

Edit:
ingame screenshot:
Image
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Re: TMW GUI - skinning thread

Post by ElvenProgrammer »

i wrote:I suggest to make map to every file used in GUI and place it on TMW.wiki.

That would be nice to have skinning tutorial and let people to make their own skins. Maybe skins should have XML files describing areas of element on image.
I think letting people create their own skin is somewhat planned, but since it's not a priority noone ever thought about it deeply as far as I know. Writing some requirements/ideas on the wiki could be a start so we can begin to ease the process of customizing gui skin.
i wrote: Lets see what we got in TMW. We got new splash screen, a bunch of new tiles and maps. And old GUI. So I was trying to change that, and found some potential problems for future skinners.
Next I wanted to change borders of windows. But modifying thickborder.png won't worked and then I realize that we are using vscroll_gray.png instead of thickborder.png for scrolls and windows borders. And here is my question: Why?
Good iniative. Why the image for scrollbars was used for dialogs it's a mistery also to me, I guess it was the quickest one to use which granted a background.
About the current gui graphics, well I mostly like them even if there's a lot that could be improved, such as scrollbars (as you noted), close buttons, background, ...
I'd be glad when someone would like to improve the current gui graphics.
If you're serious about replacing the whole skin, I'm curious enough to see where it goes...
There's not much to judge on your current progess, but looks promising to me.
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Re: TMW GUI - skinning thread

Post by i »

bg_quad_dis.png
Image

checkbox.png
Image

close_button.png
Image

resize.png
Image

slider.png
Image

vscroll_grey.png
Image

Ingame view:
Image
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Usiu
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Re: TMW GUI - skinning thread

Post by Usiu »

I suggest replacing guichan lacking UTF support with more advanced and customisable CEGUI http://www.cegui.org.uk/wiki/index.php/Main_Page
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Re: TMW GUI - skinning thread

Post by i »

Unfortunately I must AGREE with Usiu. Lacks of UTF-8 compatibility and drag and drop functionality is major disadvantage of guichan. However it means rewriting almost all client code. But IMO it's better to do it now, nor later.
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Re: TMW GUI - skinning thread

Post by Crush »

The problems you are mentioning have already been solved. Drag&Drop functionality, UTF-8 and TrueType font support is already implemented in the client branch for the new server.
Image
(Localisation is working too, as you can see)

As much as I dislike guichan for its constantly changing API and notorious compilation problems: Replacing the whole GUI library in the current stage of the project would be quite insane. It is much easier to work around the problems of Guichan (fortunately it is designed in a way that makes it very extensible and easy to modify) than reimplementing the whole gui with another toolkit and thus losing years(!) of work.
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Re: TMW GUI - skinning thread

Post by ElvenProgrammer »

i wrote:slider.png
Image
Actually I preferred the previous color scheme, and also I'd like to see a plain background instead of a textured one.
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Re: TMW GUI - skinning thread

Post by Rotonen »

Please do not let this thread die before there are at least 5 skins I (or the general consensus) have approved.

So far 0/5 for me.

Thank you (beforehand) for your cooperation and patience.
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Re: TMW GUI - skinning thread

Post by Matt »

Nice idea, I would prefer a skin that matches with the style of your login wallpaper.

http://i3.photobucket.com/albums/y67/ir ... h-test.png
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Re: TMW GUI - skinning thread

Post by Modanung »

I like Iru's skin.
If you're looking for 3D FOSS games be sure to check out LucKey Productions on itch.io
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Re: TMW GUI - skinning thread

Post by i »

Rotonen wrote:Please do not let this thread die before there are at least 5 skins I (or the general consensus) have approved.

So far 0/5 for me.

Thank you (beforehand) for your cooperation and patience.
Rotonen: consider that TMW is one of the most unskinable games. Current GUI isn't configurable via XML files, we are using unproper files for borders, font pixmap recoloring is the only option for changing text color . It lack of functionality. We have limited space on gui pixmaps. There is no enough place for various effects like scratched borders. Gui opacity works only with background pixmap which is in my opinion wrong. Opacity parameter should work on whole GUI layer.

On this topic I was only trying to improve our GUI. But I noticed that It is very hard skinable. Anyway if we aim to have 5 or more same skins with different colour variation and slightly different shape... then I will no comment that. That's not the way it should be done.
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Re: TMW GUI - skinning thread

Post by ElvenProgrammer »

i wrote:But I noticed that It is very hard skinable.
Your effort together with our could make tmw easily skinnable, just note all the things that could be improved and we'll take care of developing them.
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Re: TMW GUI - skinning thread

Post by Rotonen »

Just give the feedback to the developers on what you actually need for what you want to try. They are not psychic, artistic or user friendliness savvy.

I just tried to express that there should be five different alternate approaches to our gui out of the box. Apparently that developmental step is not yet possible without some work under the hood.
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Re: TMW GUI - skinning thread

Post by kr0n05931 »

bump
Lazy bum.
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Re: TMW GUI - skinning thread

Post by Rotonen »

9-patch has not yet emerged in the tech dev sector. Pressure our tech devs to implement that and we'll see about this, finally.
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