CriticalCid

Ah I see you have changed the height of your video row, then it’s no surprise that my column values haven’t centered the video. I honestly don't know why all elements would disappear but I would try to give the background transition presenter 0 as ZIndex and the main grid 1, that would cause that every element in the main grid is automatically one layer above the background. But I don’t know if all other ZIndex values in the main grid would need to be higher than 1 as well, that’s something you would have to try out. Also when I look at the documentation than it seems that currently is only vertical text scrolling available. So horizontal scrolling would need some extra code from Jason in the backend as well. The Big Box theming engine is still early days and @Jason Carr adds new features for it as the theme creators would need them. So If you ask him nicely he will surely come back to you with a solution for this.

Thanks guys. I’m just giving back the knowledge and experience I got through creating my own theme Unfortunately not. Big Box doesn't support Flash and probably never will since it's an old and dying technology.

You can center some XAML elements with the Alignment properties but those are currently completely buggy for videos, unfortunately. @viking and myself are frequently asking @Jason Carr to fix this but it seems to be a real hard one to solve. In the meantime you could do the same workaround that I use for my own theme as well. You have to define 3 additional columns in the row for your video. 2 as spacer left and right and one for the middle which has the video in it. On this way you can make the position of the video fix. To find out the correct widths for these columns you have to calculate them. That’s one of the reason why I’ve said that I prefer to set all rows and columns manually and divide them in to exactly 100% and prefer additional rows/columns as distance keeper over the margin property. That makes something like this really easy. Just use the Rule of Three to get the right percentage values. For example: You have set your height for the video to 32% in your last posted code. Considering that you are designing the theme primarily for 16:9 aspect ratios we can take 1080p as a reference resolution. 32% of 1080 pixels are 345,6 pixels. Now we take the dimensions of your video which you’ve said are 812 x 214. We know that Big Box is keeping the aspect ratio when it’s stretching a video. In this case it stretches it to the calculated 345,6 pixels in height to fill the row the best as it can. This is 61,48% larger than the original video. Now we need to multiply the width of 812 pixels with 1,6148 to get the value of the stretched width of the video in your view. That’s 1311,22 pixels. 1311,22 pixels is circa 68,3% of 1920 pixels. That's exactly the value we need for our column in the middle. Now we just have to divide the remaining 31,7% by 2 and we have all 3 values for our columns. If I haven’t miscalculated should the end result look like this: <Grid Grid.Row="2"> <Grid.ColumnDefinitions> <ColumnDefinition Width="15.85*" /> <ColumnDefinition Width="68.3*" /> <ColumnDefinition Width="15.85*" /> </Grid.ColumnDefinitions> <transitions:TransitionPresenter Grid.Column="1" TransitionSelector="{Binding ImageVideoTransitionSelector}" Content="{Binding ImageVideoView}" IsContentVideo="true" /> </Grid> Just replace your current video element with this and the video should be centered. You can also use that exact same column definition for your System Info row as well and you’ll have the exact same size for it.

Some things to test/check if your videos don't work: 1. Try to switch your Video Playback Engine in your BigBox options. I recommend to use VLC because WMP highly depends on the codecs which you have installed locally on your PC in order to play some formats. VLC should be able to play almost everything without the need to install some additional codecs. 2. Are the videos named exactly like your platforms in LB? 3. Have you tried to put the videos in the standard platform video folder? “.\LaunchBox\Videos\Platforms”

Btw. I just have checked if it’s possible to add the time and date to a view. It’s possible but the time won’t get updated and It always stays at the exact same time on which it was when you have opened the view. So that probably requires some code in the backend first. I’m also not sure if it’s possible to add some extern code for a weather widget or similar. That’s a question that @Jason Carr has to answer.

When I create a new view I will always consider first what kind of elements I will need. Then I estimate how much space each element will probably take. Based on that I define all Grids and Rows. For example: Based on your mockup you will need 5 elements. 1. The time/weather 2. The platform video 3. The system info 4. The wheel 5. The scrolling description Because you also want some space between all elements you will need something as distance pieces. You could use the margin property for that or add additional rows/columns between your elements. I personally prefer additional rows/columns but everybody to his own. In your case it could look something like this: <Grid.RowDefinitions> <RowDefinition Height="4*" /> <!--TIME--> <RowDefinition Height="6*" /> <!--SPACER--> <RowDefinition Height="20*" /> <!--VIDEO--> <RowDefinition Height="2*" /> <!--SPACER--> <RowDefinition Height="36*" /> <!--SYSTEMINFO--> <RowDefinition Height="2*" /> <!--SPACER--> <RowDefinition Height="11*" /> <!--VIDEO--> <RowDefinition Height="4*" /> <!--SYSTEMDESCRIPTION--> <RowDefinition Height="15*" /> <!--SPACER--> </Grid.RowDefinitions> I personally like to do this manually because it’s easier for me to divide exactly 100% over all elements. This way it’s easier to imagine how everything will turn out or you can calculate exactly how much percent a certain element will need. Adding and resizing these with the Visual Studio GUI will just lead to a bunch of cryptic numbers and it’s extremely hard to tell directly in the code how much space a certain row/column will probably take. Of course you could also use fix pixel values instead of percentages but that will limit your view to a certain desktop resolution. So if you want to add the video than you can simply add it to the Row that you have created for it. <transitions:TransitionPresenter Grid.Row="2" TransitionSelector="{Binding ImageVideoTransitionSelector}" Content="{Binding ImageVideoView}" IsContentVideo="true" /> Just keep in mind that the numeration of Grids and Rows always start at 0. So the row for the video may be the third row in your view but it’s number is actually 2. And if the size of your video isn't right than you just have to change the height of your row.

I personally use a main grid and organize the complete structure of the view with Columns and Rows in this one. It's way easier than just adding a bunch of grids and try to get them in to the right position with Alignment and Margin properties.

You could also try to set the stretch property for the image. It's Stretch="value" Values: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.windows.media.stretch(v=vs.110).aspx

You’ve set the width of your canvas to just 1910 and the height to 104. But your image is set to 1920x120. You’ve tried to compensate that with the Margin property but it doesn’t seem to work. I assume that the image tries to keep its aspect ratio and because it hasn’t enough space it doesn’t fill the whole screen. Maybe you could try to set the Horizontal Alignment to Stretch, give the image the size it needs or resize the image itself. I’m also surprised that BigBox didn’t give you an error message because you have assigned your wheel to Row 1 but you haven’t defined any Rows in your view yet.

You want to completely restructure the main menu elements. In this case it’s indeed better to just delete everything and start from scratch because you have to set all columns and rows completely new. To answer one of your questions above, yes you can set individual background images for all platforms. Just put an image of your choice into ".\LaunchBox\Images\Platforms\"Platform Name"\Fanart". If you want to use this mechanic in your theme than you can leave the default background code in there. So I would advise to just delete everything between </Grid.Background> and the last </Grid> line It’s also no coincidence that my horizontal platform wheel view looks similar to what you have in your mind. Aeon Nox was a huge inspiration for this particular view

I’m no designer and have zero Photoshop skills. So all of my theme elements (except the background video) were made entirely with code.

The user @Antropus made a program called "Lightspeed" which makes that very easy. It adds the MAME driver info (which are basically emulation cores for the different arcade hardware types like Capcom Play System, Neo Geo, etc) for each game. But unfortunately his tool doesn’t work with the latest LB versions anymore. He is working on a new version of his program which will work with the current LB releases but he seems to be very busy at the moment. So unfortunately you have to wait until he releases the updated version of it. You can find his thread here:

I’m not sure, but I highly doubt that there’s currently a way to customize the image types for the image switching feature. I know you can switch to the back when you are in the game details screen but that’s a separate function which you can’t use for the normal games views, unfortunately. Maybe @Jason Carr could add support for it in the future, but right now it isn't possible.

The best way to get started with XAML is probably the Tutorial series from Jason himself: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL6pTDaHeAz-X8yNgOD3DPxUf1gaB2FLzb There’s also a documentation.pdf file in the “Themes” folder of your LaunchBox installation which features most of the LaunchBox specific XAML elements. The XAML Tips and Tricks thread is also quite useful: http://forums.launchbox-app.com/topic/28698-xaml-tips-and-tricks/ And last but not least can you grab some themes in the download section and look into their XAML codes to learn how they have achieved the things you want to use yourself. I also advice to always use the default theme as base for your own themes because it's the most clean and stable theme to build on.

You can set a default background image for all games in a platform which gets used when there’s no image for a particular game. Just put your background image in: LaunchBox\Images\Platforms\"Platform Name"\Fanart If you still want to use the animated background for these views than you can change it manually in the XAML files in the "Views" folder of my theme. The file for the view in your screenshot is called "WheelGamesView.xaml" Just replace this line(it's one of the first lines in the file): <transitions:TransitionPresenter TransitionSelector="{Binding BackgroundTransitionSelector}" Content="{Binding BackgroundView}" Height="{Binding ElementName=Canvas, Path=ActualHeight}" Width="{Binding ElementName=Canvas, Path=ActualWidth}" IsContentVideo="true" /> With this: <Grid> <MediaElement Name="BackgroundVideo" Height="{Binding ElementName=Canvas, Path=ActualHeight}" Width="{Binding ElementName=Canvas, Path=ActualWidth}" Stretch="Fill"> <MediaElement.Triggers> <EventTrigger RoutedEvent="MediaElement.Loaded"> <EventTrigger.Actions> <BeginStoryboard> <Storyboard> <MediaTimeline Source="pack://siteoforigin:,,,/Themes/CriticalZone(v1.3)/Videos/BackgroundVideo/Background.mp4" Storyboard.TargetName="BackgroundVideo" RepeatBehavior="Forever"/> </Storyboard> </BeginStoryboard> </EventTrigger.Actions> </EventTrigger> </MediaElement.Triggers> </MediaElement> </Grid>

I haven’t made one because my workflow for doing this in batch involves a lot steps for setting everything up properly and different programs for recording/edit/encoding. But if you wanna tackle console games than I’ll be more than happy to write something up and share my scripts with you. It could probably take a few days until it’s finished, so stay tuned

In your first screenshot there shouldn't play any background video at all, that's one of the views which are using just your nromal background image settings. But the second should have it. Have you renamed the theme folder? It only works if you leave the name as it is.

Only views which were designed to use platform or game theme videos are using the animated background. All other views like the GamesListView are using normal images based on your background priorities settings. If you don’t want the Logos to show up in the background open LaunchBox (not BigBox!) and go to Tools -> Images -> Background Priorities and change it to your likings.

I have wrote a list for all the source material I would need to do a theme. You can find it in the first post here: I'm absolutely no designer nor I have any Photoshop skills. The only thing I can do is to merge it all together in a video. So I'm kinda depending on your submissions.

That’s weird. I honestly don’t know how that could happen as this video also uses an older theme which I don’t even have anymore. Nevertheless, I have re-recorded it and it should be replaced in the LB downloader very soon. If you don’t want to wait than you can already grab it on the EmuMovies FTP, it’s called “punchout.mp4”. Just replace your old one with it. Here you can find further info's about the FTP:

Hi @Maddoc1007, you see that wrong because it was the other way around. You could only use 2D Boxes for the CoverFlow element in these views in Beta-15 because CoverFlow ignored any other image type you have set in the properties. You now can/have to set the CoverFlow to any image type you want. If you want 2D boxes you have to change the image type to ImageType="Boxes"

Microsoft Paint doesn't support any transparency and will always turn any transparent background into a white one. Like some users already suggested you'll have to use another tool like Paint.NET, Gimp or Photoshop for it. Also make sure to always save/export your images as .PNG files because .JPEG doesn't support transparency either.

Well, I already did a request for you, so you know what kind of media you have to provide me in order to do a request like this I will gladly do any requests but without your ideas and source material i won't be able to do any video themes for you.

Select all your games with Ctrl + A, right-click on any of the selected games and choose edit. Select “Emulator” in the mass edit dialog and leave the value blank. That should do the trick

For everyone who hasn't seen this announcement yet, there are now 1080p versions of the recorded HS themes available on the EmuMovies FTP!