Kaleidescape Skin Replica in progress - Skinning help is wanted!

one thing which i just thought of which would be really cool is if the focused item had a larger thumb (say 50% larger) and it "hovered" above the others producing a shadow effect. unfortunately, i dont think this is possible with the skin engine. based on how the new list works, i believe the rows above and below the focused item would shift to make room. (jmarshall, is this correct? and would this ever be possible?)

something like this?

no, i mean a larger cover image that would be about the size of your yellow rectangle.

That's certainly possible - the focuseditem can overlap the others no problem.

<!--
<posx>-5</posx>
<posy>-10</posy>
old <width>80</width>
<height>120</height>
<texture>KSFolder-Focus.png</texture>
-->

<posx>-15</posx>
<posy>-20</posy>
new <width>100</width>
<height>140</height>
<info>ListItem.Icon</info>



I put the yellow box, because KS has it.

Also fluidman nice graphics, I am totally unable to do that. If you want I can use those instead of my crappy ones.

now add a sem-transparent box surrounding it to kind of push the adjacent thumbs behind it into the background to make it stand it more.

MacGyver Wrote:

kraqh3d Wrote:now add a sem-transparent box surrounding it to kind of push the adjacent thumbs behind it into the background to make it stand it more.

Yes I think that focused tumbnail would look great with a semi-transparent yellow box, and if possible also add the database information in the center similar to the original Kaleidescape together/inside that yellow box:



PS! Only my 2 cents but I think that you can stray slightly of the path of an exact Kaleidescape clone if you like, I mean, if you see possibilities for improvements/enhancements then I suggest you make them. And in that regards I wonder if you have seen the screenshots from the Big Screen TV Series plugin for Microsoft Windows Vista MCE? It borrows a lot of interface layout ideas from Kaleidescape but tries to improve on it to make it unique. Like it has the focused tumbnail zoomed like kraqh3d suggested you do for your Kaleidescape replica.

since the thumbnail is larger, i dont think that a bright color is really necessary. too me, it detracts from the skin. i think it it would be better to use black with a something like an 20% alpha channel to make the items that are "behind" the expanded thumb seem to disappear in a shadow.

I think I can see how to do that.
1 - A WrapIcon window
2 - Lay the top of "the floor" behind the lower quarter of the main icons down first.
3 - Display all icons over the first small piece in (2), then display them all again, only flipped horizontal and vertical, and put them below.
4 - Overlay a diffused gradient bottom over the second rotated set of Label.Icon's from the bottom of the screen to the bottom of the main icons.
5 - Display the enlarged focus icon and it's "mirror", then the back shadow at the top, then a slice of the diffused gradient bottom from the bottom of the screen to the bottom of the focused main icon.

Flipped doesn't appear to be in the manual, but rotate is. (not really very accurate)
Also, I'm not near a computer with XBMC on it, so I can't test this; but could you "flip" an Label.Icon by making the <height> a negative number.
Just a thought.

Also so much more could be done, if Label.Genre,Year,Tagline.... were available to windows other then library and VideoInfo. Would it be hard to implement in the source for XBMC, is it worth asking.

omg! that looks incredible! but i dont believe its possible to get the mirror image at the moment. the "rotate" option you're refering to is an animation tag. it actually spins the image on screen. afaik, there is no way to alter textures other than the animation tags.

the label info is only avaiable to the library window because there is no standard way to attach metadata to video files. so we get the info by scraping imdb. and we want to maintain a seperation between files and library so that there's as little dependancy between them as possible.