About skinning Luna

[Branis]

I'm almost done with a skin for Luna, but before I finish I got a couple of questions and BRs:

Questions:

- It seems that not all background colors are editable (panels marked with pink Xs), right?



- In the Formats folder what are AudioMixingDesk, DefaultFormat, LocatorLabel, MuteButton and TextViewer for?

BRs:

- The VstMpuControlPanel supports transparency in the PlayerPanel, but not in the Vst editor (when MpuEditorControlPanel is the background).



- When PNGs that are part of the vst editor are altered, the skin is reloaded and the vst editor recalled, Luna crashes. This happens only if the edited PNG was previously loaded into memory.

[muzycian]

I'm almost done with a skin for Luna, but before I finish I got a couple of questions and BRs:

Questions:

- It seems that not all background colors are editable (panels marked with pink Xs), right?

Correct; But in beta 9, some more areas are properly defined by the skin:

-> the background of the trackheaders (i.e. below the tracks)
-> the background of the entire window. this will be visible for every area that is not covered by a gui control
-> note that the "AudioMixingDesk" format has gone since relaced by "WindowBackground"

- In the Formats folder what are AudioMixingDesk, DefaultFormat, LocatorLabel, MuteButton and TextViewer for?

AudioMixingDesk: obsolete in beta 9
DefaultFormat: used whenever a format is not found.
LocatorLabel: used for the locator flags in the timebar (e.g. Sequence Editor, Audio Lab)MuteButton: not used at the moment
TextViewer: the background of the text, e.g. when displaying the license agreement, the welcome text or when showing the plugin log

BRs:

- The VstMpuControlPanel supports transparency in the PlayerPanel, but not in the Vst editor (when MpuEditorControlPanel is the background).

I'll check this. (do you need the transparancy now?)

- When PNGs that are part of the vst editor are altered, the skin is reloaded and the vst editor recalled, Luna crashes. This happens only if the edited PNG was previously loaded into memory.

Fixed in beta 9.

Thanks!

[Branis]

BRs:

- The VstMpuControlPanel supports transparency in the PlayerPanel, but not in the Vst editor (when MpuEditorControlPanel is the background).

I'll check this. (do you need the transparancy now?)

It would be nice to have it before Luna 1.0 is out.

I noticed a transparency problem with the "Edit.png" too, though it is not a problem for my skin.

[muzycian]

The VstMpuControlPanel supports transparency in the PlayerPanel, but not in the Vst editor (when MpuEditorControlPanel is the background).

In fact, VstMpuControlPanel does not support transparancy, also not in the Player Panel.

At this point, i don't see why you would need it there.

Could you please send (here, PM or email) some pictures to explain what you want to do.

I noticed a transparency problem with the "Edit.png" too, though it is not a problem for my skin.

What problem did you notice?

[Branis]

The VstMpuControlPanel supports transparency in the PlayerPanel, but not in the Vst editor (when MpuEditorControlPanel is the background).

In fact, VstMpuControlPanel does not support transparancy, also not in the Player Panel.

At this point, i don't see why you would need it there.

Could you please send (here, PM or email) some pictures to explain what you want to do.

By looking at this image, it seems that the transparency works in the player panel, but not in the VST editor:



Here is why I'd like to have transparency in theVstMpuControlPanel.
Without transparency, the VST editor looks like this:



I'd like it to look like this:

I noticed a transparency problem with the "Edit.png" too, though it is not a problem for my skin.

What problem did you notice?

The edit button should be transparent around the orange circle, but there's something wrong:



The strange thing is that by scrolling the mixer left and right, the anomaly changes

[muzycian]

In the above picture, it seems like the player panel supports transparancy, but it isn't.

The background behind the VstMpuControlPanel is displayed by a prior drawing when the player panel showed a "No Player", where there is no player specific control panel, and thus the full background was drawn.

Anyway, watch out for beta 9: there is what you want

I noticed a transparency problem with the "Edit.png" too, though it is not a problem for my skin.

The edit button should be transparent around the orange circle, but there's something wrong:



The strange thing is that by scrolling the mixer left and right, the anomaly changes

Are you sure your Edit.png picture is ok? This should work.

[Branis]

I rechecked and it's still not ok.
Here's how it is when Luna is loaded:


see how the edit button doesn't look the same on all channels, check the bass channel

and this is after left/right scroll:


There's some refresh problem, maybe.

[muzycian]

Found the problem, fixed in beta 9

[Zpok]

From what I saw in this thread your skin looks wonderful. Just wanted to say that.

[Branis]

Thanks

[muzycian]

Yes, it's a great skin!! And it will be on the mutools website soon.
First lets finetune some last things (Branis i'll email you about this one of these days)

[Branis]

How about having different types of mixer strips with different colors, for easier identification. Something like this:



Unless I overlooked something, I think that the VerticalSliderBody.png isn't necessary because the graphics could be done on the AudioMixerStrip.png.

[pljones]

VerticalSliderBody.png probably gets re-used on a collapsed channel strip (PR2) whereas there will be a different graphic for the collapsed strip itself. We shall see (unless it's clear from the PR2 screen shot..!).

[muzycian]

VerticalSliderBody.png probably gets re-used on a collapsed channel strip (PR2) whereas there will be a different graphic for the collapsed strip itself. We shall see (unless it's clear from the PR2 screen shot..!).

In PR2, there are small and large mixer strips as you can see here:

http://www.mutools.com/temp/luna-pr2.png

Branis, i already made a small version of the mixer strip in your skin, so that's already done

The idea to have multiple versions of a mixerstrip sounds good, been thinking about that too.

Even been thinking to remake the mixer strip gui based on a Format instead of a Picture, and so that the Format could be recoulered (a gray Format that then takes the color the user has chosen for that strip

But that would mean you have to (partially) redo the graphics of the mixer strip, i.e. cut it up into:

-> a background format
-> label format
-> plug slot format
-> output format
-> ...

And there may pop up some complexities in this system... i did not (yet) go the full thinking path...

My conclusion was (also because it would take quite some R&D resources) to keep things simple and use the current picture-based system, which is very good too.

But then it's certainly a nice idea to have multiple versions of the mixer strip; Then the user could select another mixer strip graphic for certain mixer strips.

OR (just something which hits my mind now) we could do a HUE shift to give another color to mixer strips, then the user can select the hue-shift ("Change Color") for the mixer strip.

All just ideas.

Cheers,

Jo

[muzycian]

Oh, and about VerticalSliderBody.png : it's there because maybe there will come other places where there are vertical sliders.

Maybe the vertical slider in the audio mixer strip could have a transparant background so that it doesn't use the VerticalSliderBody.png, but just shows the mixer strip picture at that place

(Branis, note that the VerticalSliderBody format in your skin would not display well for sliders that have another height! we don't suffer from that at the moment since the mixer strip is the only place with a vertical slider now, but that could change in the future)