Kaleidescape Skin Replica in progress - Skinning help is wanted!

I posted the images (all 4 of them) their size really should not matter all that much, but I wanted to let someone who is artistic be able to fix it up.
Things I can't do (but wish I could):
Make the transparency of the mirror reflection fade off on the bottom (like microsofts does)
Give all the surfaces proper depth and shadow.
Create a pretty top menu.


Just a note. The damn aspect was wrong on my win32 xbmc, so thats why all the icons are fatter then they looked as I was coding them.

Question, can you colordiffuse a ListItem.Icon over a black square, or colordiffuse a png over a ListItem.Icon. I've tried them before and after each other, moving the colordiffuse to the second one each time, and it doesn't work in win32 at least. (to darken the no focused icons)

Looks cool I'll start thinking about how to do the animation.

Oh, and I might look at extending either <colordiffuse> to separately define the diffuse color at each vertex. That should give you your fading stuff.

For the reflection, it's easy to define the end state of the reflection animation (which is all you need in this case) but I'm not sure how to define it in a meaningful sense for an actual animation (ie from normal to reflected state). I think the best idea is to just move points on a straight line from there starting point to the end (reflected) point, and define the reflection by the line in which you reflect.

Cheers,
Jonathan

All the icons scroll left and right, where as the 3rd icon from the right is fixed in place.

Also, why did -height let me flip it, but -width didn't?

Sorry if I'm not coherent .
My job sucks, I've been awake for 42 hours straight.
I'm starting to hallucinate.
I'm going to bed.



See I can't make graphics to save my life.

To be honest I couldn't even figure out how you did the reflection then I noticed you used negative numbers for the width and height, How did you even discover that that works ? seems like a huge guess even jmarshall who did the skin engine thought you id it a different way

Never thought that -height would work, but it does just fine An unintended consequence of going to unsigned floats for storage of all coordinates

If you just use a negative height instead of negative width it flips it correctly, so no need for the reflection animation as you point out.

I'll add support I think for the multiple colordiffuse/vertex so you can fade better.

Cheers,
Jonathan

couldnt an image with a gradient alpha channel be placed on top of the icon image to give it the appearence that the reflection is fading away?

Yes, but then it's fading the foreground instead of the background. Would be fine for the case above, but not so good if you were fading to a non-constant background.

thats sweet!!!

genuis!
looks great, but one think i would recommend that varies from the ms version is to put a snyopsis of the movie from the database info on the main screen, so u can scroll through the covers and see what the movie is about as well. maybe it could be put in the same brown overlay that contains the movie title? i think we can stray from the ms skin and make it more functional.

i love that we can duplicate other gui's from other projects, it shows the power of the new skin engine. I think xbmc is best served with original interfaces though. or mix and match to create something unique and different from others. I love the kaleidescape idea of having the movie info on the main screen show up when that movie is highlighted. I hope we will see a fantastic skin emerge from this... xbmc just keeps getting better and better!

Ok, I've fixed the flipping vertically in SVN, and I've added the new <colordiffuse> stuff and enabled them for lists. eg:


Will give the shadow effect you are after (near enough). Note we fade to top as the image is reversed.

Cheers,
Jonathan