[namrrac]

hi all my name is namrrac: i've don some skins over the last couple of years for all the major dashboards but always thought of xbmc as being to complicated. i've been waiting for a skin that would do what i believe xbmc is capable of, and not seeing it so i’m going to build my own. the problem is i can't find any information on the topics i’m interested in to really make my skin shine. for instance i want to move the main list of songs down in pm1 and can't seem to find which xml or where at in the xml file to edit. also the xbmc logo pack seems to be missing. i'm not complaining but it defiantly makes getting into skinning a tad difficult.also where the hell do i find the tool to make an xpr, i’m tired of having all my images un compressed. (not sure but i think i might need a dev kit?)

chokemaniac if you could/would/have time to post some of the ways you got into making xbmc skins and some of the tools you use it would be very beneficial to the movement.

-namrrac

ps: sorry for the long post.

[Chokemaniac]

hey there

i started skinning by just replacing images at first (xbmp)

when i started xbmc, the skin engine was pretty damn simple

by now it became a little more complicated since we added different resolutions and motherloads of new controls

handling all the resos sure is tricky

i can only suggest to reverse engineer the default skin and if you get stuck, try to change the references...

im basicly just using notepad and photoshop plus some other gfx apps to spice up the phtoshopping (like cinema 4d)

[namrrac]

thanks bro. i'm using photoshop, imageready(to make animated gifs) and golive to simplfy the upload process. can you recomend any other programs.

[Chokemaniac]

nope - its not about using as many progs as possibe - its about overcomming yourself to pull it off!

so just go for it

[namrrac]

and the texture compression tool, is there one freely avaliable?

[tslayer]

you don't need that. just place your images in the skin's media directory.

ts