[REQUEST] LCARS (Star Trek) inspired skin for XBMC possible? Any volunteers?

Hey NickyZero, I'm interested in seeing what you've got so far.. I've been working on my own LCARS skin off and on for a while now, and if our ideas match up well, perhaps we could discuss together.

Killarny Wrote:Hey NickyZero, I'm interested in seeing what you've got so far.. I've been working on my own LCARS skin off and on for a while now, and if our ideas match up well, perhaps we could discuss together.

Yeah, I'd find it usefull, Im fairly new to XBMC skinning, I've done evoX, and UX skins before (I suppose UX stands for more, seeing how its also XML based)

So far its mostly graphic switches for PMIII until I understand more of the skin, but I hope to seperate it from PMIII asap

Ok heres my first mockup for the seperate skin (the non-pm based)



The info is actually (in concept) a custom default.tbn, with an overlay on top (bars around the screenshot and the "Holodeck analysis").

I also wanted to give more of the skin an LCARS/Trek feel, so im going to "re-label" some buttons (if you see what i mean, just the button title, nothing else so now confusement), for instance "View: type" becomes "Cycle view mode" (yeah, its crap but what can you do?) Gamesaves becomes "Memory Banks", XLink Becomes "Hail networks" and the whole Games/Applications section becomes "Holodeck" (I thought it was a cool idea at least...)

you know I had a lot of ideas for my LCARS skin to give it that authentic and wonderfully dorky star trek feel, many of which I already implemented. I'd be willing to share what I have and what ideas I had if you're interested.

timdog82001 Wrote:you know I had a lot of ideas for my LCARS skin to give it that authentic and wonderfully dorky star trek feel, many of which I already implemented. I'd be willing to share what I have and what ideas I had if you're interested.

I'd appreciate anything anyone has to offer, the only semi-relivant skinning knowledge I have is UnleashX (also skins in xml, but a single skin.xml file).

At the moment i'm just comiling some images.

Oh, BTW, I nearly have ambient audio sorted but theres just a few hiccups left to sort...

Its an extremely rough way of doing things, but instead of having a half-second "blip" Sound for, say, cursor... you have a "blip" and a 30 second ambience clip. Which does, in effect, work.

However...

The down side is, you get a small, half second gap of silence between each reload of a sound file (I.e. scrolling through a list *Blip* *ambience* *SILENCE* *blip* *ambience*), Not a majorly big problem, but would be good to sort out.

Secondly, if you have the LCARS sound pack active (for testing I just made a pack, similar to "bursting bubbles") You cant change skin, as the skin tries to reload, whilst playing what XBMC thinks is just the *blip* for cursor/select when its really playing a 30 second ambience track, and ultimatly crashes.
(sorry if that made no sense...)

So far, I've been keeping fairly private about my skin efforts, partly due to embarrassment of my lack of graphics skills. But, I do have a specific philosophy that I am following with my skin, which I'll describe here a little.

I've noticed that many LCARS implementations (almost all of the websites that I've seen as well) have useless animations and sound effects littered all over their interfaces. Take lcars.org.uk for example: first it makes you sit through an animated video that is loud and obtrusive, and really doesn't functionally do anything; then once you get to the main page of the site, there is no clear indication of which parts of it are links to click on, and the elements don't follow any sort of recognizable color scheme.

While this makes things look good when you stand back and glance at it, the result is not very easy to use for more than novelty factor. As Agathorn mentioned, LCARS usually doesn't work very well in reality. So my efforts thusfar have been aimed at making a skin which is first and foremost just as functionally useful as any other XBMC skin, and secondly follows LCARS conventions (such as they are).

Also of importance to me is avoiding useless graphics and animations. Every piece of text on my design actually gives you relevant information, and everything that looks like a button to activate is actually a button.

For colors, I'm using the color standards from lcarsdeveloper.com/ in the multidisplay category (oddly enough, they publish this color standard, but don't seem to follow it on their own site).

Hi, i would like to help out if i can. I am not good with graphics, however i have been skimming through the xml files to see how they work. I am interested in trying the LCARS skin "as is" on my XBMC-Linux. Can we get an alpha? with the soundpack?

My skin is only about halfway usable. There are no dialogs implemented at all, but all the windows are done. (with the exception of the xlink kai stuff, as I'm not even sure that anyone still uses xlink, so it's really low on the priority list)

I still have tons of tweaking left to do, but my free time is pretty much 100% dedicated to finding a job before I go completely destitute :/

I don't want to hijack NickyZero's thread; he and I haven't formally combined our efforts yet. (I probably shouldn't have posted the screenshot in your thread either, sorry NickyZero) So I'll restrict my comments to design issues which NickyZero can contemplate if he desires

Its ok Killarny, We do need to discuss our "collabing". And dont worry about hijacking, This is a "LCARS development" Thread, not a "NickyZero's LCARS" thread, so anyone whose done any LCARS related thing, is welcome to post and discuss.

@littlebear1981: At the moment, the sound pack is EXTREMELY unstable, and im still trying too work out a few bugs, (not helped by blowing my speakers the other day )

As for an alpha release, im afraid not, its not even anywhere near alpha at the mo, its just an assortment of graphics and hopes.

Also, I have a quick question for anyone who knows scripts well (I may post this in script development too), with regards to "ambient audio", would resumeX be any good?