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Originally Posted by EvilDreamer After seeing a lot of traffic about the work putting together skins and the soliciting of core improvements for 0.2, I make the following suggestion.
Problem
Everytime a plugin is created or sometimes changed, the skin must be updated to reflect that. There's several issues with this:
1. Frequent skin updates (every MP release and every new plugin)
2. As plugin development increases, skin update time increases
3. Prevents skin developers from spending time on new skins
4. Reason for some to stop and others not start developing skins.
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I agree.
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Solution
Create a Skin Engine API that a plugin developer can use to create his/her UI. Briefly, define an API that would allow the skin developer create a skin "construction kit" which has all sorts of pieces in it (arrows, buttons, appropriate fonts, frames, etc.) that can be mapped to specific functions in the UI.
The skin developer would make a skin as normal. But when it comes to skins, merely puts all the various graphics and maybe blank buttons of various sizes and fonts to used on the buttons. This would all be defined by the API: graphic function (up arrow for example) and it's size in pixels.
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wouldn´t this lead to skins all looking the same?
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The plugin developer would create a function within his code, include that appropriate graphic on the appropriate place on the screen (map it?)
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This way the developper has to do the job of the skinner?
But I think it would be a good idea to have some things you propose, so that there could be standard elements, so that basic functions of a new plugin would work with any skin