Is the skin editor dead?

[perry59]

First of all, sorry if this topic has already been beaten to death.
Second of all, many thanks to the MP dev team, a truly great product !!
Now on to my question. Is the skin editor a dead project?
I downloaded some code for one in C#, I'm assuming its from an old project from the dev team, as it has "team media portal" in the comments. I cant find anything, code or binary on the "hamheed" project, guess its dead too?
Needless to say, the code I got is quite outdated, would'nt even run beside the newest build of MP, so I got an old version of MP to see what the differences where. Saw how the old code was looking for subdirs in the language folder and fixed that. Now it will at least. There are other issues though, namely it doesnt support all the latest skin features, and it seems to be built with an older version of visual studio/Net cuz there are problems with forms not finding resources.
Sure would be nice if there were some newer code around I could play with since I'm not really a programming guru.
Is anyone else trying to do something with a skin editor?
Would be nice to have one!

[infinityloop]

short answer, yes its dead since ages.

the developer who started it "dissaperead" as far as i know...

we would all be EXTREMELY happy if any coder from the community could take care and get it working again!

[perry59]

Bummer.
By the "developer" I assume you are referring to "Hamheed"?
Never did find his code, dont know if it was any better than the official (but dead)
mediaportal code, which is what I have.
Like I said, I got it to at least run with the new build, still some minor resources issues that should not be difficult to fix. Unfortunately there were no docs with it so I gotta figure out program flow and what everything does which may take awhile since I'm no C# guru, but its do-able. THEN, to make it truly right I would need to implement new code to handle the latest MP features.
Hard to believe theres no coders out there with an interest in this !

[infinityloop]

Originally Posted by perry59

Hard to believe theres no coders out there with an interest in this !

all our current coders allready have "their areas" which they take care about (which eats up all their MP-sparetime).
if one coder is leaving, then the area he maintained and developed "freezes" too, until someone else appears.

its always the same story, sadly most ppl in the community dont realize/belief that


but very cool that you are working on it now. you will surely make many designers happy

[perry59]

I understand. I'm sure most of you dev team ppl have "real" jobs, families, etc. like me which eats up most of your time !

[mzemina]

Originally Posted by infinityloop

...but very cool that you are working on it now. you will surely make many designers happy

I think the biggest impact it will have is for recreational artists who don't want to mess with the XML coding behind skinning, it can be daunting experiance. Great news with your digging into this overlooked area! Chris is right MANY people will want to see this completed!

[perry59]

By the way, is there an svn for the skin editor?
Would anyone happen to have a version of the code done with VS2005
so I dont have to fix all these resource issues?

[infinityloop]

Originally Posted by perry59

By the way, is there an svn for the skin editor?

its in our main svn

https://mediaportal.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/mediaportal/trunk/

direct svn link

https://mediaportal.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/mediaportal/trunk/mediaportal/SkinEditor

[perry59]

Thanks Chris, may as well start with the "latest" stuff. <me hopes its VS2005>

[mzemina]

perry59 - To get an idea of what the skin editor needs to perform, just take the BlueTwo skin and make a couple of simple edits on one of the screens to get started. Move/change the location of a button. Then go one to try other excercises like centering an object, or left (or right or center or justify) aligning a group of objects. The skin editor should visually allow easy placement (and alignment) of objects and then the generation of the XML code to create the skin. If you already know this, my appologies for stating the obvious.

Mike