Forge Skins & Themes

[moomarc]

Moomarc (and anyone interested) here is the psd files of the background and icons, feel free to edit them to your liking, and if you want upload the modifications i will appreciate that

http://www.mediafire.com/?9d0e5j3kp634vw6

oh and sorry about the double post

Thanks Rooger! Not sure how I ended up posting the request in the wrong thread, but glad you noticed it. I'll upload the 4:3 when its done (possibly only next week - stupid work thinks it can interfere with everything).

[Rooger]

I feel you man, thanks for the help I posted it in my screen res, if i tried to convert it to 4:3 I would probably end up messing the layout, btw any ideias for a new skin?

[moomarc]

btw any ideas for a new skin?

Harfenik requested some planes-based themes a few posts ago. Seems like a good place to start. Nice range of light and dark themes represented there.

[moomarc]

Here's the 4:3 screen resolution version of Rooger's Lady Vess skin. Installation same as he described. I like to have the command zones visible so the playmat area is smaller. A zone free bg is also available. Just remove the '1' from res/skins/lady_vess/bg_match1.jpg, replacing the old background.

[Rooger]

Cool, thanks for the 4:3 version replaced my current font with yours it looks good, goes well with the skin theme.

I'm working on a new skin, using planes is a good ideia but it's hard to find a plane with resolution that suits 1680x1050 or bigger so i might have to use other kind of pictures to the background, currently i'm searching some hi res matte painting images that might look ok for the planes-like based skins

[moomarc]

Here's another new all-purpose theme. Just extract the zip contents into <Forge folder>\res\skins.

Should be good for all resolutions

[Rooger]

Nice one moomarc, cool color scheme.

[moomarc]

Nice one moomarc, cool color scheme.

Thanks! I decided we needed a little green in there. Definitely my personal favourite skin at the moment. Just feels fresh.

I keep wanting to make another option for a light overall scheme, but my colour palette always ends up shifting to darker shades as I tweak things. Oh well, nothing to do about it. As long as users have some extra options.

[myk]

should we be adding these to the distribution? we could also make them downloadable like the card images...

[moomarc]

should we be adding these to the distribution? we could also make them downloadable like the card images...

It would definitely be ideal to have them downloadable from within the game. Skins like Journeyman should be straightforward as it is independant on resolution. For the Lady Vess skin we'll just have to append a screen ratio to the name to make it intuitive which one to use. Also for lady Vess, I think we should just leave it up to users to adjust the battlefield layouts themselves rather than trying to get the skin selector to also install a relevant preferred_layout.xml.

How should I upload them? Should I just upload the theme's folder into a Themes directory on Cardforge, or should I zip the folder first?

EDIT: And should I include a screencap collection similar to what I did with journeyman above in each folder that could later be hooked up to show a preview of a selected skin before installing it?

[myk]

It would definitely be ideal to have them downloadable from within the game. Skins like Journeyman should be straightforward as it is independant on resolution. For the Lady Vess skin we'll just have to append a screen ratio to the name to make it intuitive which one to use. Also for lady Vess, I think we should just leave it up to users to adjust the battlefield layouts themselves rather than trying to get the skin selector to also install a relevant preferred_layout.xml.

+1 -- when you name the skin directory, a suffix of _4x3 (or _16x10, or whatever) for aspect ratio-specific themes would make things clear. Maybe in the future we can include a skin.preferences file for each skin that can contain a freeform name so we can put the aspect ratio in there in proper form (4:3, 16:10, etc.) and not have the windows file system complain of illegal characters.

How should I upload them? Should I just upload the theme's folder into a Themes directory on Cardforge, or should I zip the folder first?

I'd hold off on uploading them just yet. We should figure out first how we're going to do it, and when we do upload it, we'll want to get the others uploaded too. I have some ideas, but I want to finish up the writable data separation branch first. I'd say just add them to res/skins for now.

EDIT: And should I include a screencap collection similar to what I did with journeyman above in each folder that could later be hooked up to show a preview of a selected skin before installing it?

that would be a good idea. I'd say include as many screenshots as you think necessary and we can cycle through them on the UI. just prefix the filenames with the string "screenshot" and we'll find them dynamically.

[moomarc]

I'd hold off on uploading them just yet. We should figure out first how we're going to do it, and when we do upload it, we'll want to get the others uploaded too. I have some ideas, but I want to finish up the writable data separation branch first. I'd say just add them to res/skins for now.

I'll handle the uploads once we're ready for them. For now though I'll just leave them here. Enough users are finding them for now, and I don't want to bloat the size of snapshots unnecessarily. I think users are really going to appreciate this content separation/handling that you're working on. Thanks.

[Caranthol]

Sorry if this was commented before.

Would it be possible in new releases to include a skins path into the main.properties file? This way, we could have all skins in an external folder, as I have my decks, and only would have to change the path in the file.

[moomarc]

Sorry if this was commented before.

Would it be possible in new releases to include a skins path into the main.properties file? This way, we could have all skins in an external folder, as I have my decks, and only would have to change the path in the file.

This falls under the current work that myk is undertaking. Most user downloadable/changeable elements are going to be moved from the main Forge folder to default folders per OS or as stipulated by preferences. I'm not entirely sure whether it will be in the next beta or not, but I think it will.

[myk]

It will likely be in the beta /after/ the next one. There are only a few days left in this development period, and I wouldn't feel comfortable merging the branch without thoroughly testing the migration path (which I'm only just writing right now).