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Hi All,
I want to create a XBMC skin where I can show various media categories on the face of a 3D object. This would either be a prism (where I have 4 categories to show) or a cube (where I have six categories). The idea is to show the icons representing a media on the face of the object. The user should be able to navigate to various categories by rotating the object about a predefined axis and select and play a media by selecting appropriate icon on the visible face of the object. Is this feasible using current XBMC UI libraries?
If not, please suggest how best to approach the problem. Thanks in advance for any inputs that you may provide..
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It's possible, yes. Just not very practical. You'd have to do each face as a separate image control (or button or whatever) and apply rotation animations to each of them so that they appear in the correct place. This is non-trivial.
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Thanks jmarshall for quick response.
Can you please elaborate why you say its not practical? Is it because the icons for media cannot be added to the face at run time?
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It's not practical due to the amount of code required and complexity of the code required. Take a look at how coverflow is done in any of the skins for instance.
If you're wanting this to work for listings of videos or music or whatever then basing it on the way coverflow is done is the only way to do it. It'd be easier for a main menu selector I suspect, though still a reasonable amount of computation required.
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Thanks folks for your invaluable suggestions. I will give these a try and post the results shortly.. but would love hearing more from the gurus on this.
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any more reference sites that I can look at? Really appreciate your help.
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Watzen,
I could not run your skin. Is there a location from where I can download the latest version of this skin?
Thanks in advance.
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read the thread... it's not a complete skin. drop it in your PAL16/9 folder in the PM3 skin folder.
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Hi Watzen,
Can you pl. hlep me with how to calculate the angles in animation? For ex., how did you arrive at the figures "438.5252" and "188.5252"? Is there a tool that I can use to calculate these angles ?
Thanks,
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I am able to figure out the angles and also the "center" for animations. However, "438.5252" is still a mystery..
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Yeah. Of late, I have been getting quite a bit of such fun - courtesy XBMC skinning ..