Skin/Theme Engine...Free?

[PolyVector]

Are there currently some "advanced" features to this engine? Such as allowing background pictures in say... listboxes, or treeviews or even the editor gadget?

I would like to think that the engine itself is advanced
But to answer your question, listboxes, treeviews, and editor gadgets are not yet supported... They will be supported in future updates... All gadgets that are currently supported do have many 'advanced' features. They support basicly every WS_ style you can think of... that goes for text alignment as well as things like images on buttons... The engine is designed to clone all features of XP skinning...

Currently Supported Controls:

• Buttons (including ToggleButtons)
• ImageButtons
• Checkboxes
• Radio Buttons
• GroupBoxes (Frame3D)
• Static Text (TextGadget)
• Static Images(ImageGadget)
• TabControls (PanelGadget)
• HeaderControls (Top portion of a ListIcon Gadget)
• Windows (client area only)
• Limited ToolBar support (Background is controled by the parent window's BG)

Planned Supported Controls:

• Window (borders/regions)
• ListViews
• ListIcons
• TreeViews
• Edit Controls
• ProgressBars
• ScrollBars
• Menus
• UpDown (SpinGadgets)
• ComboBoxes

How about animated or gradiant or custom titlebars? Ability to have a level of transparent windows? I already have the code for that but wanted to know if it'll be a native feature to the engine..

Animated controls are not supported w/ XP skins, therefore they won't be supported here... Transparency might be trick on win95/98, so we'll have to see about that. We do, however, have plans to impliment transition effects (such as 'fade') and possibly sound effects later on...

Is it possible to extend the skin file itself?

Not at the moment. In the future we are going to move to a zip-based skin format so that you will have the ability to easily add in more files...

If there will be two versions or a key version or whatever, would it be possible for you to provide a PB LIB version at an extra cost? Still including credits etc..

We've gotten a lot of requests for a lib version and we are strongly considering it for a later release...

[Shannara]

Oki dok, I guess I am going to have to wait for later releases before coughing up some dough Currently, I am converting over a VB "skinned" app/game to PB.

The thing is, the window borders are skinned. It is basically a borderless control, a titlebar-less control, with just small skins to emulate the borders.

I ended up creating a custom control for a listview replacement (or listbox), that supports various styles of text (bold, italics, forground/background colors, fonts, etc), as well as the ability for images (16x16) to the left of each listbox item. Background image is available because it is basically an ownerdrawn control. Right now I am implimenting "skinned" scroll bars (basically an adaption from vbaccelerator.com control).


As for the editor, I know there are ways to create a background image'd rich edit box, seen it done for vIRC and mIRC (I believe), I just need to figure out how to do it...

The major thing is, this is all in VB, and Im looking for the PB equivilent. With these things not supported in the skin engine, the controls would look majorly out of place in a skinned app


Thanks for the heads up- though.


A screenie can be found here (w/o scrollbars skinned):

http://www.magiwars.com/sshots/sshot1.png

[PolyVector]

Looks nice

The thing is, the window borders are skinned. It is basically a borderless control, a titlebar-less control, with just small skins to emulate the borders.

That is a very effective and simple way to accomplish skinning... I only wish it were that easy for a theme engine... We are planning on using dynamic stretching/tiling of all sections of the themed window... Regions can be a real pain when trying to accomplish such an apparently simple task... I hope when we add more functionality you'll still be interested
Some of the code on VBAccelerator is very impressive... I still use their old AlphaIcon creator

[Shannara]

Well, another thing is to do a borderless window (erm I meant window above ), and give the users an option to pic what pics they want to use for the top/bottom/left/right borders, and the theme engine stretches (height or width, depending on border side) the image to fix the window. Or in my case, I ended up tiling the border the direction it needed.

I am still interested, and may end up using it for that game, but, it'll look ugly, unless you are providing some way for use to programmically change the skin or have handles to the skin (controls) in such a way where we can add in our own additions and such?

Oh one last thing. I noticed buttons are on the list. Is there support for hover buttons? (erm, different image when mouse is over button)?

[PolyVector]

...unless you are providing some way for use to programmically change the skin or have handles to the skin (controls) in such a way where we can add in our own additions and such?

The skin engine won't hinder custom controls or owner-drawn controls in any way (unless you want it to)... If you are talking about creating custom controls(or owner-drawing) based on images in the skin, then I'm sorry to say that it is not available yet... We are planning to eventually expose many of the rendering/image routines to allow for integration with unsupported controls...

I noticed buttons are on the list. Is there support for hover buttons?

All forms of Buttons, Checkboxes, Radio Buttons, Tabs, and Headers currently support mouseovers (hovering/hot-tracking)

[thefool]

btw polyvector has you tested engine on 95 yet? flicker free there too?

[PolyVector]

I don't have a computer running 95 so I can't test it at the moment.... To my knowlege I'm only using functions that are compatible with 95... It will work in theory... In the worst case I'll only have to fix little things...
eg. I'm using my own TransparentBlt(), TransparentStretchBlt() functions

[thefool]

hmm maybe if your lucky you can find one with win95, and let him
test it. Just send the test program. But you need to find someone you thrust, thats not giving it away.

[PolyVector]

I'll just have to install it on my old busted comp... argh... I wish I had more free time...

[blueznl]

i can do a win95 test on vmware, but i got little to test it with

[naw]

Just a thought...

- How about providing the DLL / LIB for free & charging for the Skins.

There would obviously be a standard (FOC) skin with skunksoft all over it.
Alternative skins would be chargeable to the developer (and you could have a range of skins with different attributes & levels of *prettiness* that suit different pockets.

Perhaps the standard (FOC) skin is downloaded from your WWW Site each time the app is started...

It also gives you a multiple *resale* opportunity. Whereas if someone just buys your DLL for $70 and, then well thats it - thanks very much.

They buy one of your skins for $10 for AppX, then $25 for AppXpro, then $5 for AppXlite. Then one day there'll be AppY & AppZ ....

You could do custom (one-off) skins for $500 for the *big boys*

You could do a skin designer (or JPG->SKIN converter) for $500 so that others can provide their own commercial skins...

-OR-

You provide the DLL FOC with a standard FOC Skin. A standard component of any UI built with your skin is to download a new Skin from skunksoft that the user pays $2 for.

The developer is happy (they got a cool looking app cheap).

You're happy because your customer base expands to the developers end users and LOTS of free advertising.

The user is happy because they dont have Nag Screens

Anyway, I'm not a Pro Developer but these 2 ideas seems like really nice ways of reaching many more people than the immediate developers and achieving continued resale rather than simple one-off sale.

Lets do some maths:

Option1) FreeStyle engine costs $70
100 developers use $70 registered version of FreeStyle = $7000

Option2) Too difficult to estimate

Option3) Users download FreeStyle Skins from Skunksoft
100 developers use FOC FreeStyle & have 1000 downloads each = 100,000 each user pays $0.50 for a skin = 100,000 * $.5 = $50,000

[PolyVector]

@naw
Most people wouldn't like paying for each skin... That would also mean we'd have to spend a lot of time creating skins to sell...

I do like your idea of selling our ThemeBuilder instead of the engine... This would have most of the benefits of what you said, while still giving people the freedom to make whatever they like...

It would mean that FreeStyle would be 'free'... which I have wanted since the beginning... I'll talk this over with the team and see what they think...

[naw]

@Poly,

Mmm! If you dont want to build skins, I'm sure others would - either for money or for fame & glory

I'm guessing that any skins would be generic - ie: a skin built for App X would apply to App Y equally well. If that is the case, then you should play on that *advantage*. So perhaps hosting generic skins for download is a very nice (low-cost) secondary revenue-earner.

Perhaps the users dont pay for the skins, perhaps the developers do, perhaps a mix of the two. Great programmers may not be great artists & vice versa.

I use a few *skinned* apps regularly, although they look great (and that was one of the reasons why I bought them) It would be nice to apply a common theme to all of them...

Good luck with your project - it sounds very worthwhile

[PolyVector]

Thanks naw, I'll consider what you said... All very good Ideas...

[PolyVector]

For anybody still interested, progress on FreeStyle is comming along amazingly! We have decided to hold off the release until we add many features that people have been requesting...
I feel it's a good thing to wait until the engine is more mature before release....

We're currently working on adding ListView, ScrollBar, and Edit support... Scrollbars have proven to us that Microsoft doesn't want people playing with their API... We have to fight random MS rendering every step of the way ... Don't get me started!!!

Anyways, Here's another in-progress screenie to look at when you're bored
Obviously I don't make very nice skins, but you get the idea... Not a single unskinned pixel