Hear Hear!
I know for a fact how polished his skins are to this point since anytime he made changes and stuff I was going through with changes I had made too with a program called foldermatch and got the naming conventions for everything including all the sprites to be identical across the board.
Truth be told, with this setup on his skins now, it would be possible to have only one configuration for every XBox emu when his skins are done. I know madmab has no interest in coding that, and it's really not practical when different users will be using different skins, especially since 99% of any type of skin that comes out will not have coverage across the entire spectrum like Gilles is close to doing.
What I've seen otherwise, is most people who are venturing into Dynamic Skins at this point are really making skins that are more accurately called "Dual Preview" skins.
Even to artsists who decided they don't like the PMIII artwork, and I do admit that it took a while to grow on me since I used to have the XBox 360 skin on my box before, I would urge them to really take a look at the files and file system in his skins and play around with the skin configurations and see just how great it works.
For example... I LOVE likklebears skins in the other thread, but I'm really disappointed that I'll never be able to play around with all the combination of images and all of the other cool things that having it set up like Gilles has allows for.
I'll have to try to take a video and upload it somehow, but you guys really have to see what I did to his SNES skin on the game select screen using Franks spinning dragon. Now the little Madmab dragon just kind of floats back and forth while spinning across the NINTENDO banner in the bottom right corner which was wasted space since the SNES artwork is wider than it is tall. I toned down the transparancy too, so it kinda looks like a green Big Boo haunting the screen.
And that's the greatest part about TRUE dynamic skins here guys. When Gilles is done, all it takes is somebody with a little artistic talent to build off of them and change tiny aspects and make
nearly identical skins their own unique skins. (Edit: whoops... that made no cents
)
I'd even go so far as to say you could basically just take the directory structiure of Gilles' skins and replace his background images and some of his sprites and have a dynamic skin of your own in much less time than it took to concieve them and bring them all up to code today. That's exactly what I did for him on the remaining 12 or so skins. I just put black images as placeholders in all the places he'd need to do artwork so when he finishes the 8-10 or so images that differentiate a skin he could just drop them in there and he'd be done.
Try it out cbagy... Take some of your images and put them in place of Gilles' stuff and see what you can come up with. After putting Frank's spinning dragon in there and then having a reason to find out how to control animation was a very fulfilling experience for me. I'd like to see what you and Frank and others come up with when you've become as accoustomed to all the old and improved abilities the XPORT emus have come to give us when it comes to pimping out the dash.
Later,
~Rx
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Topic: The Dynamic Skins For All Xport Emus (Read 9824 times)