Theme Creation

[thygrrr]

Theming in FAFLobby 0.5+ works as follows:
Everything you see in folder _res can be themed. Simply create a folder _themes/MyTheme and put only the files you wish changed in there. You can then choose the theme from the Settings menu in the Lobby.

Yes, you can even change the entire UI layout, as long as all the types and names remain the same.

In the early stages of 0.5.x, ui files will change a bit now and then, and sometimes even a lot. So themes will need frequent small and sometimes big adjustments - sorry.

There will be an opportunity to mod the colors and formatting of the chat as well in one of the next updates.

Everyone is welcome to make themes for themselves or share them with others. The only requirement is to make the theme yourself, not just post a mockup and hope it will be created for you.

Additional resources will also be added frequently (mostly banners, watermarks and icons) and they won't break your mod, but you may want to put in modded versions of such new files as needed.

If your theme is particularly awesome, it might even get packaged with the lobby installer if you agree. (ZePilot decides what the default theme will be, obviously, and he said he wanted to make a concept for one in Photoshop once he has some time to catch a breath)

Resources for Theming:
Supported HTML subset by Qt
How to Customize Qt Widgets

[ozonex]

i will try make some theme as default skin, I start work on it tomorrow and hopefully I manage to do something cool

this is for example veeery old concept
http://i386.photobucket.com/albums/oo30 ... cecopy.png

[ToejamS]

ozonex, that looks simply amazing. Great job.

Is it finished yet?
what about now?
Gotta be finished now... surely... what taking so long...

Man, fa is a pool of hidden talents alright.

[thygrrr]

I like it too, actually. I went for a clean slate simple theme first to allow people to express their ideas.

The theme code will change considerably over the next couple of versions, but never in a way that would invalidate everything you guys worked on. Rather in the scope of small name changes, etc.

First up: Since I've been having problems with Chat performance vs. layout quality, in one of the upcoming themes chat might be a different Qt widget type (maybe a table... lol). Not sure yet where it will lead.

[Ze_PilOt]

Be careful of the scrolling bug with tables

[thygrrr]

Be careful of the scrolling bug with tables

Yeah that's why I went for a TextBrowser, but the problem is if you appendHtml() to it, it makes a new paragraph, meaning you can't keep all the usernames adjusted unless reserving a huge bit of space for the first one, and if you setHtml() on it, it takes longer and longer to parse the entire document. (that's the main reason for the high CPU load I think, but I'm also performing a more and more complex string concatenation each time someone writes a line, so maybe I can get some performance gains there instead)

As another approach, I will be trying something fancy with a document style sheet where the <td> class for the username is extended by some kind of heuristic for all such cells when long-named users write something, or something slightly less fancy permanently extending the reserved space each time a longer-named user writes something.

The performance issue is already mitigated one way or another.

[Ze_PilOt]

There is a font metric function (on QFont if I remember correctly), that return the width of any text depending of the font and size of it.
Maybe you can compute the fontMetric every time someone is typing something, keep the wider in memory, and only redo the whole QTextBrowser if the new metric > the current wider one.

Another optimisation should be to only retain a certain amount of text and erase the old one (but then maybe it will suffer from a scrolling bug too).

[ozonex]

ok, first simple skins for UEF, Cybran, Aeon and Seraphim are complieted

Download:
http://ozonex.pl/pliki/themes.rar

also needed to change some files in _res folder, they dont change when in themes folder:
http://ozonex.pl/pliki/_res.rar

INSTALATION:
themes move to _themes folder, and res files to _res folder (replace existing files)


to make better skins i need to change some positions etc. but dont know how yet

screens:
http://i386.photobucket.com/albums/oo30 ... o3/uef.png
http://i386.photobucket.com/albums/oo30 ... cybran.png
http://i386.photobucket.com/albums/oo30 ... 3/aeon.png
http://i386.photobucket.com/albums/oo30 ... 3/sera.png

[Raging_Squirrel]

dashed tabs ain't looking good for me, but the rest is great!

[thygrrr]

dashed tabs ain't looking good for me, but the rest is great!

Yes. Pretty awesome, and thanks for doing my job (i.e. the four basic themes) - now I can focus more on the lobby code. Looking forward to further developments.