2024-03-29, 17:39
So it may have appeared like sudden movement and then a sudden stop to advances/fixes on the skin which is a fair assessment.
I wanted to provide a bit of an overview of what has caused this effect and provide some insight of the challenges that have cropped up.
Working on the media flags and diagnostic panel led to realizing how many and non uniform type graphic types where in use and while I love custom material, I like uniformity when it comes to a range of system operation. Specifically things like the resolution flags. The basic ones are nice, but I wanted to find newer material since the theme is based off of the eye candy approach. So growing into ownership of this, I started looking for more graphics, icons, sets....things that all would create the eye pop stuff as well as range..... well.... there isn't a whole lot out there surprisingly.
That led me to start reviewing any and all skins to see what they were using and doing... and I quickly realized they were all texture based and needed to be decompiled. Of course these leads to the texture tool for Kodi. Tried that, it fails miserably on Win10 for some reason, some mention it works great on Win11.... but after looking at the source code... it looks like it was written with the intent of Win7.... which of course should run fine on Win10, but it doesn't.... at least for me. So I took on the task of learning a new ecosystem using the original source material "AutoIt" and that in itself is a giant clusterfuck because anything you create with it, gets immediately flagged when you compile it from you AV scanner. I realized a majority of that is because it is trying to write to the user %temp% folders and delete and that is a huge flag for most AVs etc. So I rewrote it and now it seems to be "ok" with the scanners, x32 sometimes gets hit, x64 fairs better, but even old threads here talk about AVs going nuts with it. So I spent some serious time there learning the tools, interface etc. and finished it up and will be taking it over like I did Madnox, you'll see those threads later.
Then I started to circle back to fixing Madnox and VSCode is the tool of choice... but man, it sucks for XML in general for "Syntax highlighting" to be able to navigate and see the ins and outs of the code. That led me down the path of how do I resolve that so I can program the skin easily. When you look at it, it is basically like next to nothing for highlighting based on the structure XML is vs Visual Studio VB.net or similar. My goal became how do I solve this problem? I went through hell and back to try Visual Studio 2022, Ultraedit, Notepad++, Oxygen XML Editor, and an array of others to try and find a tool that allows custom syntax highlighting... in the end, I had to do a lot of research to arrive at a real solution... which surprisingly, loops back to VSCode.
The core issue is that when you look at "basic" lines of code where it's a single "condition" and then "go do something"... that is easy. Things like multiple Boolean conditions like AND and OR coupled with ! and precedence... the Boolean operators like PLUS, PIPE, PARENTHESIS, CONSTANTS etc.... are all THE SAME COLOR in most to all of the IDE's. This makes it nearly impossible to read and sort out as the wave of code grows or multi condition... I found myself getting lost on some of the most basic stuff because I "missed" a + sign....very annoying. So after a week or so, I found a solution that works, check out the before and after:
As you can now see, it makes the world of difference to be able clearly get the picture of what the code is doing.
So now that the texture tool is "stable", the coding solved, the last piece was to create new media for the flags I was working on, that took additional time to build some templates and tweak what I wanted. So here is a preview of some of that:
So in the end, work on this didn't "stop" but was refocused so I could get some ducks in a row to be able to carry on. I will be looking at the diagnostics again because those were messed up with my additions in the PVR and I can now simulate that and make it all right.... then back to the flags...and ultimately other action items.
Hope this gives some better insight to where things are.
Chris
I wanted to provide a bit of an overview of what has caused this effect and provide some insight of the challenges that have cropped up.
Working on the media flags and diagnostic panel led to realizing how many and non uniform type graphic types where in use and while I love custom material, I like uniformity when it comes to a range of system operation. Specifically things like the resolution flags. The basic ones are nice, but I wanted to find newer material since the theme is based off of the eye candy approach. So growing into ownership of this, I started looking for more graphics, icons, sets....things that all would create the eye pop stuff as well as range..... well.... there isn't a whole lot out there surprisingly.
That led me to start reviewing any and all skins to see what they were using and doing... and I quickly realized they were all texture based and needed to be decompiled. Of course these leads to the texture tool for Kodi. Tried that, it fails miserably on Win10 for some reason, some mention it works great on Win11.... but after looking at the source code... it looks like it was written with the intent of Win7.... which of course should run fine on Win10, but it doesn't.... at least for me. So I took on the task of learning a new ecosystem using the original source material "AutoIt" and that in itself is a giant clusterfuck because anything you create with it, gets immediately flagged when you compile it from you AV scanner. I realized a majority of that is because it is trying to write to the user %temp% folders and delete and that is a huge flag for most AVs etc. So I rewrote it and now it seems to be "ok" with the scanners, x32 sometimes gets hit, x64 fairs better, but even old threads here talk about AVs going nuts with it. So I spent some serious time there learning the tools, interface etc. and finished it up and will be taking it over like I did Madnox, you'll see those threads later.
Then I started to circle back to fixing Madnox and VSCode is the tool of choice... but man, it sucks for XML in general for "Syntax highlighting" to be able to navigate and see the ins and outs of the code. That led me down the path of how do I resolve that so I can program the skin easily. When you look at it, it is basically like next to nothing for highlighting based on the structure XML is vs Visual Studio VB.net or similar. My goal became how do I solve this problem? I went through hell and back to try Visual Studio 2022, Ultraedit, Notepad++, Oxygen XML Editor, and an array of others to try and find a tool that allows custom syntax highlighting... in the end, I had to do a lot of research to arrive at a real solution... which surprisingly, loops back to VSCode.
The core issue is that when you look at "basic" lines of code where it's a single "condition" and then "go do something"... that is easy. Things like multiple Boolean conditions like AND and OR coupled with ! and precedence... the Boolean operators like PLUS, PIPE, PARENTHESIS, CONSTANTS etc.... are all THE SAME COLOR in most to all of the IDE's. This makes it nearly impossible to read and sort out as the wave of code grows or multi condition... I found myself getting lost on some of the most basic stuff because I "missed" a + sign....very annoying. So after a week or so, I found a solution that works, check out the before and after:
As you can now see, it makes the world of difference to be able clearly get the picture of what the code is doing.
So now that the texture tool is "stable", the coding solved, the last piece was to create new media for the flags I was working on, that took additional time to build some templates and tweak what I wanted. So here is a preview of some of that:
So in the end, work on this didn't "stop" but was refocused so I could get some ducks in a row to be able to carry on. I will be looking at the diagnostics again because those were messed up with my additions in the PVR and I can now simulate that and make it all right.... then back to the flags...and ultimately other action items.
Hope this gives some better insight to where things are.
Chris
