I can help with graphics / GUI's

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misagh

Active Member
This looks like a great way to get into the scripting world... though I'm not completely inept when it comes to coding stuff like basic PHP, I've never really dabled further.

However, I work with graphics by trade and I can help with VG style interfaces for anything. I can use existing VG files to make it all match the VG skin or make new designs depending on the request. If you'd like me to work on something, just post here and I'll get to it as time permits.

What would help is a sample of the kind of thing you're after, you could even make a rough skitch in MS PAINT and I'll do the rest.

It's not much but I'd love to start contributing.
 
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Cr4zyb4rd

Active Member
Most of our UI work (and for that matter, UI work in general these days) is composed of sub-elements that use skins and widget-like parts. Currently we have a VGskin.xml file that points directly to the game's own default UI pieces for its templates/textures. Nothing that I know of uses graphics that texture a window wholesale...in fact it would be kind of hard to do under lavish.

http://www.lavishsoft.com/wiki/index.php/LavishGUI
tells the story of what parts we use and how they're related.

If you were to contribute a new skin, or even some new pieces I'm sure some would be happy to incorporate it. There's been a bit of talk on irc recently of decoupling the skin from the default Vanguard UI.
 
M

misagh

Active Member
Got it. I took a look at what files the XML uses, and it uses elements from VgrdParts.tga through to VgrdParts04.tga.

Opening those files up in an image editing program reveals they have basically every kind of graphical element one would require for any GUI, so I guess it would be kind of like reinventing the wheel.

Regardless, if some need for custom elements arise I can be of service.
 
X

Xeon

Active Member
misagh said:
Got it. I took a look at what files the XML uses, and it uses elements from VgrdParts.tga through to VgrdParts04.tga.

Opening those files up in an image editing program reveals they have basically every kind of graphical element one would require for any GUI, so I guess it would be kind of like reinventing the wheel.

Regardless, if some need for custom elements arise I can be of service.
Click to expand...
What would be cool would be for someone to create a vgelements.dds file (like the current commonelements.dds file in the Interface directory) that contained all the elements we would like to use in the VGSkin.xml file.

That way we could reference a common set of items with our skins, as right now we make people download a VGSkin.exe .NET app and run that. It has one bug that I know of and it's kinda a pain to do.

I actually created a vgelements.dds file, but I did it wrong (did not have the alpha mask on it) and just kinda gave up at that point.
 
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Cr4zyb4rd

Active Member
Also, several of the templates in the VGSkin.xml (the main window background, for starters) point at empty black textures.

Having a few alternatives within the file (VG.window.puffycloudborder or whatever) would be nice. In particular some transparent or transparency-using (rounded corners, etc) would add a nice touch. With transparent textures you can at least change the background color of an element at runtime, since as of this moment changing the texture itself requires rebuilding the entire element.
 
M

misagh

Active Member
The vast majority of the work I do is related to web and print graphics, never really worked with a DDS file, however I'll do some reading in the coming few days and see if I can understand what is needed and come up with something.
 
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Cr4zyb4rd

Active Member
dds is just a "direct draw surface" file, yet another bitmap format. as far as I know there's nothing new or magical about it...it just stores alpha information in some non-standard way or changes the byte-order so it's faster for direct-draw to load or somesuch. The Gimp supports it with a plugin, so I'm pretty sure photoshop and other popular tools can handle it albeit with a bit of fiddling.
 
M

misagh

Active Member
Okay, so if I understand correctly, you'd like me to go through the XML file, find all the objects it makes calls to in the VG directory and put them all into one DDS file?
 
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