New skin ideas (+ screen)

[Alfisko]

Hello
From what I've heard you lack imagery for your great project and that's why I've been trying to make some skin for CEGUI that you guys could use in the future as your basic all-round skin.
I made up something in Inkscape very quickly and would like some feedback before I move on with it.

Here is the screen:


I'm an artist who isn't really into xml and programming stuff, so I won't be able to code it into CEGUI appropriately.

[CrazyEddie]

Hi

It is indeed the case that CEGUI is badly in need of some new and interesting skins.

I think what you have in the image you posted is really good; there is nothing that stands out and makes me think "ugh, I don't like that!"

One thing I would say - as general advice for any skin - is where possible, for the final 'source' imagery we use, if that were to be greyscale, it makes it easier to apply customised colours within CEGUI later - so as a final step in the process, desaturating the imagery, and maybe even ensuring the range of greys for each sub-part goes from 0 to 100% in value would maximise the possibilities. Whether you have to worry about that I think depends on whether you intend supplying the original vector based imagery, or something rendered to a raster image.

Don't worry too much about not being comfortable with XML / programming. Given some decent imagery to work with, I would be more than happy to handle that side of things.

Keep up posted on your progress and let us know if you have any other questions

CE.

[Mikademus]

Pitching in here as a fellow (part-time) artist: your skin draft is really nice! It is neutral, yet not dull. It is modern, yet has a timeless character to it. It is clean, yet interesting. So good design all over! It would be a great benefit if the green colour for the active window can be customised since that might be a factor that puts some people off (people who are sensitive to green?) or possibly might make it difficult to use with the art and colours of some projects.

[Alfisko]

There is a tint from green to yellow, so it's not everything in one color and thus could not be customised so easily, but I guess that you can make something that generates gradients too, so it may not be the biggest problem. You can als make it for just one colour and lose some details, but that probably won't matter so much. I think that CEGUI should use one theme with it's colours (green from your logo) and then there will be a customiseble one for other people and their projects and maybe for one of the demos that shows the colour customisation itself.

I've added several things and put it all in a properly sized window.

I would like the inactive window to have 80% opacity and even though everything in it would be desaturated, the cross will be red so it stands out and can be easily recognized if you want to close the window.

Is something missing? I will do all the versions of buttons active, hovered etc once I have it all.

(older version: http://alfisko.com/cegui2.png)

[CrazyEddie]

Things are looking good

I take your point about the colours being a gradient, and agree that it's probably best to leave those in the imagery.

I think the only thing that is missing is parts for pop up menus and a tool tip

To answer a point from IRC, there's no special requirement for how the imagery is finally arranged, I can fairly easily make it work regardless of the final arrangement of the component parts on the image.

CE.

[Kulik]

The skin looks very good IMO.

As for the arrangement, I think it would be great if the imagery made sense even for artists. If the imagery looks like a window with a tab control next to it, etc, things are way easier to tweak in just the bitmap editor (no need to touch XML for simple changes). If it's just a bunch of small boxes arranged seemingly randomly, artists will have a hard time adjusting the skin. On the other hand some parts of the image may be redundant.

What still needs to be decided is the resolution of such skin. Taharez has a fairly low resolution.

[Mikademus]

Some redundancy in the skin bitmap file is a small price to pay for easier editing (a readily understandable but somewhat redundant bitmap file is easier than a one highly efficient but decontextualised).

About resolution: The gradients and details of the skin would suggest a higher resolution, but that is fine imho.

[Vitis]

Hi. What is the status on this? Can I help? IMHO what OP posted is perfect, I could go ahead and make a theme out of that if nobody else is working on it.

By the way, about making it grayscale, I don't think it's such a good idea. It's better if it has color, that way the color can be changed by changing hue and if you want grayscale it's also easy to grayscale the imageset. But going from grayscale to color is hard.

I will just need the OP to post or PM me a transparent PNG (or tga) with every element in isolation (no background).

[CrazyEddie]

I am currently about a third of the way though making the XML files for this skin. I've taken longer than I'd hoped due to heath related issues. The skin should be finished this week some time - though it does use some things that are 0.8.x only, due to us intending to use this as the new 'default skin' in the forthcoming 0.8.0 release.

CE

[Vitis]

Ah, that is great news. I'll selfishly wait until you finish, then.

About the necessary 0.8 features, are those changes in SVN? Cause I see the last update in SVN was 5 weeks ago and I don't know if you keep the SVN updated or if you commit by big chunks. Also I'm interested in knowing if the SVN is committed because I made a workaround for autoscalable windows with fixed aspect ratio but I heard you were working on that problem for 8.0 so if you haven't fixed that yet I could send a patch.

Hope you get well soon.

[Kulik]

We are using mercurial now. There should be an announcement top of the forum.

[Vitis]

We are using mercurial now. There should be an announcement top of the forum.

Ah sorry, I checked in the website only.

EDIT: question deleted, I didn't see the datafiles, found them.