atomix_1madbeastie
I was wondering if any1 has any pointers on making skins and what programs u recomend for editing bmp and the text? I have the top part of the bmp the buttons, and sliders ect. but the bottom part where you put the buttons, sliders, and dif colors of them and stuff i dont know where to put them lol.
Posted Fri 03 May 02 @ 3:49 am
Tommy_2Tall
If you already have the basic BMP-image with all the graphics and buttons then you're almost halfway there:
just expand the image size so you get a white area big enough to hold all the sliders, different states of the buttons, 3 copies of the beat-graph-window etc.. just make a huge white area beneath the image and shrink it later :)
Then you make one copy of each different button (if some look identical you can use the same copy for all of them) in that area and be sure to include a bit of the surrounding graphics around each copy so you don't get any annoying white scrap-lines when you star XML'ing (I did that mistake, just copied the buttons and didn't have enough space around them to adjust the XML-coordinates later on)
As for image-editing I use Photoshop but generally any image-editing-program that handles BMP-files (=ALL of them?) works as long as you are comfortable with the program and the tools supplied in it.
I've tried a few XML-editors but in the end I've stuck with Notepad as I have more control that way, the other ones I've tried just make a long list of objects (button, button, button, button, button....) which doesn't help ONE bit.. so I've just re-arranged existing skins XML-files so that I have logical phrasing of the text so that I see that "this is the player A/ player B/crossfader-section" and changed the coordinates and such to fit my graphics.
Hope I shed some light on the subject but I'm a bit out of a mental blur today so this might just be a incoherent nonsens-post :)
just expand the image size so you get a white area big enough to hold all the sliders, different states of the buttons, 3 copies of the beat-graph-window etc.. just make a huge white area beneath the image and shrink it later :)
Then you make one copy of each different button (if some look identical you can use the same copy for all of them) in that area and be sure to include a bit of the surrounding graphics around each copy so you don't get any annoying white scrap-lines when you star XML'ing (I did that mistake, just copied the buttons and didn't have enough space around them to adjust the XML-coordinates later on)
As for image-editing I use Photoshop but generally any image-editing-program that handles BMP-files (=ALL of them?) works as long as you are comfortable with the program and the tools supplied in it.
I've tried a few XML-editors but in the end I've stuck with Notepad as I have more control that way, the other ones I've tried just make a long list of objects (button, button, button, button, button....) which doesn't help ONE bit.. so I've just re-arranged existing skins XML-files so that I have logical phrasing of the text so that I see that "this is the player A/ player B/crossfader-section" and changed the coordinates and such to fit my graphics.
Hope I shed some light on the subject but I'm a bit out of a mental blur today so this might just be a incoherent nonsens-post :)
Posted Fri 03 May 02 @ 9:31 am
atomix_1madbeastie
Thank you T2T u made it very clear - i have everything just need to edit the xml, after im done i hope to get your opinion and thoughts on it ('_;) thanks again!
Posted Fri 03 May 02 @ 7:31 pm
I'm new at this and I did my first skin by importing another skin (reloop mk2) into CorelDraw and - using transparencies - tracing over with my own graphics. Its simple to resize everything (and there's no loss of quality from resizing) and you save it as a bitmap when you're done. Then I went through his xml and took out irrelevant sections and modified coordinates, etc. Its also much easier to work with text in an illustration programme like Corel or Adobe Illustrator than Photoshop. But Photoshop is my choice when editing bitmaps.
Posted Fri 31 May 02 @ 7:14 am