Theme Creation

[Kryo]

The themes are 4 MB each, so maybe not. But I wanted to move themes into Appdata and then we and others can distribute them as installables (dont have to be MSIs, could be ZIPs. I'll work something out. Because themes have so much control over the ui, they need to be updated along with the lobby.

Maybe we can, rather than PNGs, use JPGs for the larger images.

well if we already talk about file size: while the update always be handled via a full client download (18mb currently)? or will you try to have a update tool that will only download changed files?

[thygrrr]

It's not that easy, trust me. Either you need some program component that runs with admin rights, or you have to create incremental MSI patches (MSPs).

It's not a priority but some improvement will come in that area.

[ozonex]

if i use jpg and gif files theme size will be reduced to 1mb or even less, but they dont work at the moment

[thygrrr]

Interesting, I'll see how I can get them to work.

[Ze_PilOt]

You need to pack these dll :

site-packages\PyQt4\plugins\imageformats\qjpeg4.dll
site-packages\PyQt4\plugins\imageformats\qgif4.dll

Don't ask my why png is working without.

[thygrrr]

WOW, SVG SUPPORT! O.O

Will be packaged in the next builds, moved it to my _lib dir for setup.py.

[thygrrr]

If your lobby crashes with an error at startup, DELETE YOUR THEMES (all of them) and restart!

[Lu_Xun_17]

really nice themes there!

[thygrrr]

Themes will change in the next version(s):

• they go into %COMMONAPPDATA%/FAForever/themes (C:\ProgramData\FAForever\themes for most of your)
• they require a copy of the "version" file from the latest install of the lobby or they will be deactivated for safety (so people don't get crashes before they can even login)

I will create an installable demo theme soon (this might or might not turn into an official theme pack, we are looking for a maintainer for this!). I recommend AdvancedInstaller or any other software that makes decent install packages.

Note: Currently, themes will be made incompatible by every new build. This will change in 0.7 or 0.8 when existing GUI elements will have less drastic changes per patch.

[thygrrr]

Okay, here's a theme in installable form, plus a new version of the client:

faf-uef-theme.zip

(432 KiB) Downloaded 354 times

Client:
http://faforever.com/faf/FAForeverLobby-376.msi


Please note this is for reference use by theme creators, this may crash hard depending on what you try! :] The theme will also instantly break as soon as a different client version is installed (it will refuse to load it, safely). Later versions, probably starting with 0.7 or so, will use a special UI versioning scheme so themes can stay valid for more patch levels. There are simply too many tricky UI changes going on while we are in beta so I have to invalidate themes every time or risk locking a lot of people out by accident.

Good news: I also added a "Reload Stylesheet" option to the theme menu so you can quickly check most changes while editing your stylesheet (no reconnect needed).

Caveat for theme creators: If you look into the client.css file of the sample installer of ozonex's UEF Theme I added, you will see a placeholder named "%THEMEPATH%" used in image urls, that's important and points to the directory your theme was loaded from (so people can rename your themes and qt knows where to find your images). Don't hardcode the paths in there please (themes might fail terribly on windows XP otherwise).

Speaking of WindowsXP, I need a volunteer to test this on XP for me.