[download v1.0] FLAT BLUE theme released

[verion]

I have yet to come up with idea how to present vertical snaps - especially with widescreen layouts.
For 4:3 layouts - maybe we can get away with some stretching with small cropping from top and bottom.
But not for 16:9 - Stretching snap horizontally only - about 200% - is out of the question. It will look hideous.


So far I've tried 3 ideas

#1 scaled to width (with proper aspect) and cropping about 60% of the snap

#2 show 2 snaps side by side (and maybe add some shadow overlay between them)

#3 fill that empty space with layout color

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Problems:

with #1 - It look nice, but you have to have a hi-res screenshot (or video), because small res snap blown up to 1920px will look bad no matter what. And it will show about 1/3 of the game snap - not that informative (and can be a little boring).

with #2
you have to have 2 snaps - and people usually have only 1.
Or maybe mix screenshot and video? rather not.
Show a flyer? this is not consistent with horizontal games

with#3
It looks clean - but I'm not sure if it looks good

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What do you think?

[Luke_Nukem]

Hard call!

Two snaps looks great. But is probably not a good solution due to needing two sets.
The last one looks okay, but perhaps centered? I''l have a play around.

[verion]

In the last one the blue background is too prominent.
Maybe we should scale vertical snap a little bit and cut it at the bottom.
In this case we can have blue stripe on the right with the same width as sidebar on the left.

[tomek]

What about Option 3 but with the snap image centered on the background?

[verion]

Not good. The image has to touch the sidebar right edge, without it the sidebar will be barely distinguishable from the background.

[Luke_Nukem]

I like that last one.  Would need a game info check to be able to sort out the vertical ones. I guess most people have an info dat sorted out these days.
 
I'll have a play with some trials of it tomorrow.

[Luke_Nukem]

Video preview

Tried two types of Background video. What looks best?

[verion]

I've took you grid lines idea a little bit further. It is also colorized to match layout blue shade.

[ulihox]

I've took you grid lines idea a little bit further. It is also colorized to match layout blue shade.

It looks really good!!

[Luke_Nukem]

I've took you grid lines idea a little bit further. It is also colorized to match layout blue shade.

It looks really good!!

It does!
I've just switched to a better style of managing layout dimensions to make doing that positioning a lot easier. I've also started adding in customization options.

Such as shaders for each element, or even full-screen shaders. Looks great!



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[Luke_Nukem]

Here's how it's looking. Just ironing out some niggly little bits now.

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[verion]

The geometry distortion and the grid lines really adds up.

As for the vertical setup for widescreen I think we could make snap a little wider and tuck it under sidebar and right screen edge - like centered to the big snap window.

See quick mockup.

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And the info pane could be smaller. I know it scales to match game tile height - but it is a little to big that way - 50%-70% of what it is now would be better.

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Maybe I should make white outline around icons little thicker? To make it look better with shader.

[Luke_Nukem]

Hmm, I actually thought I'd done that. I fix it up.

[Luke_Nukem]

More sneak-peeks! 

Getting closer to releasing it. Got to optimise it, and maybe add in scrolling animations for the edge game tiles.
Pretty customizable so far since each element of the theme is it's own object, and all rendered on a "screen" object so that full-screen shaders can be applied after applying shaders to each individual object.

In the screenshots I've got the Halation shader running on the screen object, with a bloom shader on the video, and a bloom on the artwork icons.. Other shaders are; scanlines, pixels. And probably will add a few more like phosphor and plain CRT curvature.

[Luke_Nukem]

Need testers now, theme is HERE

Over the next few days, if there are any issues reported by others, I'll start building in some error checking.