eatkinola

Also, in the meantime maybe try another theme like Fundamental. It's a shot in the dark, but just for kicks.

I agree with @DOS76 it does sound like a scaling issue, but yours is set at the default. Hmm. What version of Windows are you running?

Hi welcome to BB and the forums! It'll depend on which theme you're using. Please provide the theme name and a screenshot of the problem so the community can better help you.

Thanks! Yeah, I'm interested in seeing what other theme designers do with it. Should be within the next month, sooner if I can manage.

Those views are looking very nice. What if you faded in the entire view, e.g., the grid or other element that is housing the background and all controls? Then, you could avoid having to fade to black and avoid worrying about temporary blocking of input. You should be able to add this fade-in animation without changing your other animations, though you'd have to find something to bind it to as a trigger...

Any way you could upload a video showing what it looks like? It might help us kick around some ideas.

^^ THIS ... just the sort of thing for which playlists were added to LaunchBox.

Don't know of a way to do this via XAML, but I wonder if you could implement a simple IBigBoxThemeElementPlugin and just have it process and ignore the left, right, enter, etc keys. Could another way to address"pop-in" be to fade in those controls, using a storyboard? I use this approach to simulate a transition.

Yes, that's right. It'll play the game video embedded in the appropriate platform background image. If there is no video found, I'll probably make it display a screenshot of one found in the library. The plugin to do this is functional, but I need to clean it up a bit. I'll release the plugin separately, and it can be used in other themes as well.

Yes, the Fundamental theme rounds box art. Minimal-AO does too, b/c I mooched that from @Grila who always has good ideas.

No need for all that! Just wanted @Cookz718 to have some different options. Thanks for all the forum help you provide, glad you finally got your mod badge!

The link @neil9000 provided is to Grila's custom control set, which includes a custom WPF control to add the time. My control set AO Bigbox Customs also has a time/clock control. There is also more recently a binding Jason made available, so you don't need a custom control. I pulled the following excerpt from CriticalZone V2 to give you and idea how to use this binding: <!-- TIME --> <TextBlock x:Name="Clock" Text="{Binding CurrentTime}" /> <!-- DATE --> <TextBlock Text="{Binding Source={x:Static sys:DateTime.Today}, StringFormat='{}{0:MMM-dd-yyyy}'}" /> Try it out and see if it works for you.

Nice design. Thanks for the offer to collaborate, but unfortunately I've got so much on my plate now at work. Keep working on that theme!

Finished almost all of the arcade systems, along with some old TVs such as for NES, Genesis, etc. Will probably do some more next week, then I'll work on the view xaml.

I agree, it does look a little flat with the texture. Finished cutouts for Sony WEGA TV: GameCube, Dreamcast, PS2. Tried a grayscale version, to see if it'll makes the game video, boxart etc stand out more. Disregard the view layout, that's still in flux.

Made screen cutouts for the backgrounds with the Sony Trinitron TV, which is quite a few platforms such as SNES, 64, Genesis, PS1, etc.. Messed around with gimp image filters and kinda like the textured black and white rendition, but I can apply other filters or just leave the images alone.

Thanks. Yes, I was thinking about 4k too, but it might not be a big issue. Once we have the background with cutout and glass overlay, we could always try a 4k upsampled version. The image is also a little noisy because it is a screen grab from a compressed video, but I don't notice the noise unless I zoom in for editing. @viking: Do you know of a better way to extract still a image from the video? I was wondering if interpolation could be performed across the video frames to reduce noise, but I don't have software that does that.

That's right. Once the screens are cutout, they can be overlaid with a semi-transparent blank screen in it's place. Right at the beginning of the video would be a good time to grab the blank screen, before the video starts playing. I've been playing around with this in GIMP but haven't yet settled on a workflow.

No, that won't work. You have to change the XAML, and as stated above GIF can be a little buggy.

You can use imagemagik. It's free and robust. You'll have to write a simple script, but the online help pages are good.

Fyi: traction

Thanks! Those are great.

I don't know if this meets your definition of a "per-system" theme, but I'm working on something...

*** WORK IN PROGRESS *** Theme with games view that changes based on the active game's platform. Viking's platform video set inspired me to do this; thankfully he gave me permission to use his work, and to name this theme Nostalgia after his video set. Thanks @viking! I created a plugin theme element to facilitate this. Below is a sample view (still a work in progress); the GameCube game video snap is displayed using Viking's GameCube platform montage. Transitions between games are smooth even when the platform changes, so the plugin seems to be working well. The theme as planned will have one platform wheel view, one game wheel view, and the text-based filter and game detail views. It shouldn't be hard for me to finish the views. What I'd like some help with is turning Viking's videos into background images with appropriate cutouts for the TV, handheld, or arcade screen. I'd like to display the videos behind a "glass" overlay, with scanlines etc as appropriate. This theme can easily support all the platforms represented in Viking's video set; the hard part is getting all the backgrounds in order. If you'd like to help and are good with an image editing program such as GIMP or Photoshop, please let me know in a private message and we can sort out the details. If you can't help with the background images, please let me know what you think about this idea. I'm open to suggestions and will post progress in this thread; I will say though I'd like to keep the theme fairly minimalistic and focus on the platform montages. I'll post the theme for download when it's more developed. p.s. additional thanks to @keltoigael for letting me use his arcade font, and to everyone else from whom I might have mooched ideas. This is a great community.

Wow, let me know what happens. You've certainly been thorough about it.