Skin scaling for different resolutions

jmarshall Wrote:So, ignore portrait versus landscape. Consider 16:9 versus 4:3 only. How can we make it so that current skins look as nice as possible without the pure stretching that goes on now - i.e. how can we best specify "scale this control" versus "leave this unscaled where possible and alter the positioning instead"?

How could we test that? E.g It looks good on my iPad, but I can't troubleshoot on Android because I don't have one. I could only hope for the best.

How about nice and simple, down-to-Earth, Foundation-like skin made for iPad as starters. Later, it could be very easily manually fine tuned for a specific Android tablet or anything.

You can test it real simple using different window sizes on your computer. It all comes down to "does it look good in 4:3 as well as 16:9".

Actual device does not matter at all - XBMC will take care of displaying your skin the same way across all devices that have the same aspect ratio.

Cheers,
Jonathan

It might have been discussed in the past but with this idea of introducing resolution-independent skins perhaps now would be a great time to perhaps introduce, however limited at first, resolution-independent vector images.

While anti-aliasing png images are great for where XBMC is now, they are definitely limited in what resolution they can be used at before they begin to look less than perfect. The largest size, where the image displayed is exactly what the skinner had envisioned, is always going to be the size they were originally created in.

Taking Jonathan's idea of separating the screen into 3 distinct areas is going to be a challenge for skinner to create png images that are going to look good at 1024 and at 1920. There's stretching that needs to be taken into account. Or is stretching is not used, but that only works for repetitive patterns (simple gradients, carbon mesh, etc).

Using a vector image will allow the skinner to be confident that any resolution, the image will be displayed with the same quality.

From a coding point of view, would skinners be required to include these differing positions based on landscape / portrait or is that something that XBMC would be able to intelligently determine based on a single given resolution set?

Please keep the thread on topic - I have no desire to add vector based graphics at this point. I welcome a patch for it, and am more than happy to advise/comment etc. as required.

Cheers,
Jonathan

How do you like the idea of percentages in the sizes and dimensions.

A problem that i found is, if i set an background image to scale and another above that to stretch, they looks displaced if i change from as example from 16:9 to 16:1= aspectratio. Maybe it should be exist instructions what to look for, that the skin is usable in different aspectratios.

Reported a problem on trac I'm having using two resolution folders but also wanted to ask why it doesn't work like the old method.
We used to only have to have any different XML's in the other resolution folders and XBMC would use the rest from the default, whereas now all folders need all XML's.

Thanks.

EDIT: Just realised that I was defining default="true" in both resolutions. Removed one so the default ones were actually used but this resulted in squashed views so putting the same ones in each folder means they don't get scaled out of shape.

EDIT2: This also fixed my other problem.