Work In Progress Skin

[ImaTarget]

Hi all,

working on my first skin. I am kind of please so far. Most skins I have seen have whiteish chat and frame backgrounds. For this I would love to go with a dark green for the monitor look though. Is there a reason not do that? I should be able to apply custom fonts and font colors as well right? This is for a Savage Fallout campaign.

14378

[Zacchaeus]

Hmm. Not for me I'm afraid. Dark text on light background every time. I do't know why but the other way around is unreadable.

[Talyn]

I agree, that text is unreadable. I'd almost (ALMOST) suggest doing a green text on black background like a PIPBOY display but with Fantasy Grounds teeny font size, that would probably be unreadable as well.

[Blackfoot]

In order to make that work you'll need a much lighter font. A glowing green or white.
Generally speaking 'white on blue' is supposed to be soothing to the eyes.. I know we used that setup in my office for years and it worked pretty well. You need more contrast to make it work... otherwise it is pretty much unreadable... especially for folks with stunted vision. :)

[damned]

You can also use bigger fonts too. Computer style fnts though tend to be squarish and spaced apart so using bigger font sizes on top of many fonts leads to little text being displayed per line but there is plenty of room for experimentation :)

[ImaTarget]

Interesting, thanks for the feedback, I never had an issue with lighter text on dark background. When I am working on the Images they are much darker, but as soon as they are in FG they seem much brighter colored. May need to tweak this. Should work for the Icons on the sidebar at least, with the thick letters. I am considering an old Vault-Tec Clip Board as an alternative for the Computer chat window, that could work. Note that I so far have not worked on the Fonts at all, they are all still the basic ones as I have not read up yet on how to tweak those in an extension.

[ImaTarget]

Progress! I left the chat as base because it works and looks ragged enough already. Started working on windows. I have a issue with the Character Selection Screen though. I based my work on the Modern Screen, and I now realize that was a mistake. I should have created a new basic extension from the SaWo Ruleset and then gone from there. Oh well, live and learn. Anyway, the error I see in the Selection screen is inherent to the Modern skin. Any idea how to fix this? I think it may have to do with the frame definition in the XML. I tried to figure it out but so far no luck.

14438

14439

[damned]

Post the xml for that windowframe.

[ImaTarget]

That is my problem actually, I have no idea which and where it is. I used the Modern Skin for SaWo, that is all I know :-/ I have been trying to identify the definition to no avail. I checked the WIKI as well of course built the documentation seems horribly out of date with referencing windowclasses etc while the new one use framedef apparently.

EDIT: Just saw the sticky for the tutorial, ignore me until I worked through that...

[ImaTarget]

Decided to start over with a new extension based on the savage world ruleset. Spent the whole day figuring out how framedef works. Yay me! Got the Desktop working now as I want it, next step, redoing the Windows. Luckily I could reuse all of the sidebar Icons.

14444

[Talyn]

Nice! I still haven't taken the time to sit down and actually figure out all the various frame elements and what they do.

[ImaTarget]

Yea, it is a pain to do. But worth it it looks like. Will have to figure out how to make sure only the replaced stuff will be in the distribution and the XML files do not reference stuff I did not repalce. But that is later. What helped me with framedef was GIMP and counting pixels with frames till I could figure out where it counts from.

[damned]

If you define desktop it will replace desktop. If you dont define chatwindow it will use the original chatwindow. Dont include/define things you dont want to replace.

[ImaTarget]

Well I am not really doing it piece by piece and writing XML while doing so. I want to save time so use the XML replace files for the Modern Theme and just use the graphics from the SaWo ruleset. I see now that was not smart and I may start again with a cleaner set up. It seems the XML in an extension have other names then the ones in the Rulesets. There is a graphics_misc.xml in the modern theme extension but not in the Savage Worlds Ruleset. This is so confusing.

[damned]

Replacing the graphics is fine. If you manage to design your graphics with the exact same dimensions including frame lines and textures and internal frames then the coding is just copy and paste. It might be easier designing the graphics you want and then updating the XML to work for those. The actual file name is not that important - savage extensions tend to use graphics_misc.xml while in other rulesets they tend to follow the corerpg style naming - it doesnt matter - its whats in those files that matters.