Thursday, January 19, 2012

Virtual Worlds : Phoenix FireStorm : Skinning The Bird !!

Mister Acacia is online

Oh
Wow

I never truly realized just how difficult it is to create a skin for Firestorm (even harder for SL Viewer because it doesn't support multiple skins). There are a number of textures used for all the various panels, floaters and buttons, and you really need to be careful about texture-to-overlay contrast. More than 1,000 different textures and almost 4,000 xml files that define absolutely every little aspect of the viewer. Amazingly enough, even with that multitude, shortcuts were taken: many layouts are simply using the same layout definition

Worst yet, some of the layouts are defined in the viewer code itself, so no amount of xml fiddling will change some parts of the skin.

So I most humbly salute anyone who has made an attempt at creating a custom skin. I tried, and I'm throwing in the towel at this point. But I'm going to start fresh and take a different approach. One of our developers is working on a "vintage" skin that looks very much like Viewer1. Even the Inventory menus make a comeback in there, instead of the options (gear) icon. I'm going to try some minor changes, mostly to textures, and see if building off an existing skin that  has Phoenix similarities is easier than building from scratch.

It's certainly not as easy as building a Phoenix skin.

Mister Acacia is offline

No comments: