Skin Designer Images

[Craze]

Spoon,

Hope I may be able to offer a suggestion for the next Skin Designer update.
Add capabilities to be able to size "images" from within the Skin Designer similar to that of fitting labels and spectrums...by stretching out the bottom right corner (black square). This would sure streamline things rather than having to go back and forth between photo and paint programs to resize images in order to make them fit.
Thanks.

Craze

[Spoon]

Anyone know any bitmap resizing routines?

[BestRip]

Just thinking out loud...
There are quite a few programs that will do this for you... why spend time on putting it into the skin designer, I can think of a load of other stuff that would be of better use and would enhance the designer and the possible creative use of it...
Don't mean to be a spoilsport (sh..head or a..hole), but I would as said love to see some more creative changes... Transparency (to be able to have a shadow of the player against desktopbackground for example) another is the possible use of multiple images that interact with music or user controlled motion (like in winamp3 MMD3player "advanced visualizations" and its rotating volume knob for example)... list could go on...
No disrespect for your whish or of the Creator of Skin Designer's desire to oblige

[Spoons]

There are quite a few programs that will do this for you

what do you mean?

[BestRip]

Well like Craze expressed: "having to go back and forth between photo and paint programs to resize images in order to make them fit." With a little bit of planning and some structured work, this could be minimized... but the other suggested enhancements cannot be done in any way however much back and forth is employed...
WOULD REALLY LOVE to see some nice HOT enhancements done in the Skin Designer (and possibly in dAP as needed to be able to run it)!!!
Just thinking out loud... (think I've spent some 2-2,500 hours learning all sorts of oddities and functions and created some 30-40,000 image bits to make the skins I've made + some 10-20 ones of which most only I have seen, in different stages of completion, and I've had a great time, fantastic as a matter of fact... but at times it really feels like "woooork" ) ...and if you think you sense some kind of emotion laying behind, don't pay attention, think it may be a rash or something

[Spoons]

ok i get your point about the resize imaging. i didn't make the conection at first.

the thing to remember is , yes it is hard work. and yes it does become much like work. imagine how Spoon feels coding it all! :shocked:

the user feedback isn't always forthcoming either. however i don't think big corporations measure their success by personnal feedback. it is measured by sales. in this case your skins is measured by dowbloads.

in the skins download forums you have over 10, 000 views, although i think it was double that before the server hack.

and look at your dapdos xt with over 500 downloads on the skin site :happy:

[BestRip]

Thanks Razgo

I'll be out trying to find a suitable salve or something... ...for the itching spot...:nospeak:

[Spoon]

I think it would be great to expand the skins, it has to be done slowly and calculated, although I do ot want to create something like Winamp3 or Sonique 2 where a programming language has to be learned, but at teh same time I would like skins that could for example have the downscrolling characters of matrix (just one example), and for that your need scripting...

[donny]

Yap I know what you are talking about,BestRip, skin designeing is fun but sometimes exausting....

Spoon, how much of a problem would it be to add .gif files to the skins? it would solve a lot of animation problems....
I guess one of the main problems is compatibility with the old versions of skins.

[BestRip]

Hi Spoon,

The 2 functions I suggested, do they also fall under the need of programming to be implemented? Could it be furnished with preset parameters? Incredible task to be solved? I just don't have a clue about programming...
To donny... but I DO love it, was just being a bit unjustly rude to Curt for him asking about even easier handling...:blush:
The skin I'm now working on has run low on inspiration so to speak... supposed to illustrate windows 2000... and it's soooo confusing... too many windows perhaps???

[Spoon]

Shadows, I dont have a clue it must be possible as CursorXP has one...

Animations, yes they would have to have the animations stored as compressed gifs, first I would aim for a rolling animation of a skin, then perhaps to interact with elements, such as beat?

[BestRip]

Hi Spoon,

The animations of WinAMP MMD3 doesn't appear to be anything like a gif... If you download it and open the downloaded file with winzip (all components of the skin like files, code and all) you'll find the volume knob for instance is a series of images set together like the dAP font image files... so I thought in my narrow understanding of programming that it could be handled similarly in dAP...

[donny]

to BestRip: I love it too! I said it's fun, and skin designer is powerfull and easy to use... most of the time the exausting thing is when you get down with inspiration and you try many things before you get the right one....

about winamp3: winamp 3 is using a skining language so you can doo whatever you want, just it takes a looooot of time and expirience...

I thought we could for start add a support for transparent gifs, not animated. Animated would be nice too and more usefull when you think about it, but I think it is much harder to implement

[BestRip]

Hi donny,

Yes it could be fun with gif too, but I have a small objection to it on the issue of image quality. The gif formats I have seen are color reduced with ugly looking effects. I love the way BMP doesn't do that.
Have you actually disected a winamp3 skin, it's kinda fun. How to do it was explained on the skinning introduction pages on the winamp site, but really very simple, just open/extract it with winzip.
As I said before the animation appears to be very similar to the image font handling of dAP (not the windows font handling).
The inspiration drop I think mainly is a result of my determination to have the skin simulate/illustrate win2000, it is in itself not too inspiering... or??? But I'm getting more and more OK with how it's turning out... (like a slightly modernized dAPDOS-XT) Think it may be ready in a few weeks or so.
About the Skin Designer: I never would have been able to do any skinning without it, coding puts me to sleep instantly. I really love the tool but as I work with it the limits are of course tested and desires for new functions arise like any desire for evolvement naturally would, but I realize Spoon is the man to determine what should be the next step... WHO ELSE?????

[donny]

Yes, I've opened winamp3 skins I have made a few skins for winamp2, before the release of the version 3 (and before I knew about dap) and I wanted to make skins for winamp 3 but it looked a little complicated and well being that winamp3 is rather slow, with little improvments and a few degradations from version 2, I gave up totaly....

You are right about gifs, they are a little low quality, maybe we should take something like png or whatever?

ps. can't wait to see the sequuel to dapdos-xt