ray233

Thanks for all of the input! I want backgrounds to be a user choice (fan art or whatever). I have a library of 1200+ games, but am only planning to make my arcade style games available. I don't have any emulators or anything, so my goal with this is really to leverage Big Box to provide a clean console-ish interface for a single system (Steam/PC games). I use Steam's Big Picture occasionally, but I think the presentation is too plain and provides no excitement. I'm interested in this as an alternative. ----------------------------- I may try to mock everything up in Photoshop and just ask detailed questions as I run into barriers. May never get finished that way, but it is what it is. Layout is what's killing me right now. Z-orders, docking, etc....are all proving to be a challenge for me. Many of the parameters I experiment with seem to be overridden by other objects in non-obvious relationships. I'd love to be able to just drag and drop interface elements to lay out the views, but that's not how it's working.

Thanks Styphelus! I can't disagree with that. My intention is to mask the background image with a light gradient mask and/or blur effect in such a way that it doesn't matter as much. That will help, but as with any theme, weak images will diminish the quality. Ideally I'd provide an option to turn a background distortion effect on or off. The box art would have an overlayed image (with the plastic look) that's independent of the actual box art. As long as the image ratio is similar, those should look pretty good.

I greatly appreciate the feedback. I'll look into that thread soon. Thank you!

Hello all! TLDR; I created a theme a couple years ago in XBMC and approached Jason about porting it as a front-end look for launch box. At the time, he wasn't ready to focus on the aesthetics of his young application much, but in revisiting launch-box recently I was excited to see the Big Box development as a stable option within the application. I'd like to port my theme to Big Box, but want to partner with a developer so I can focus on the design work and actually complete the project. --------------------------------------- I think this is a professional looking design with a next-gen console feel. I was using it exclusively for PC games. Some of the challenges I had with XBMC (like getting videos to play properly) are stable and functional within Big Box already. I'm confident that if someone is well-versed in theme development, it wouldn't take much time to port this design to Big Box. I'm a graphic designer and have some interface design experience, but I'm not efficient enough in the development department to see this through. I know it's all feasible within the theme engine, I'm just tripping over syntax and some Visual Studio concepts. I'd like to partner with a developer to move through this quickly. If anyone is interested in helping out, please let me know. Given my busy work/family schedule, I don't think I'm willing to undertake this without partnering with an experienced developer to move things along at a fast pace. These are screenshots from this design implemented in XBMC a couple of years ago. I have some style updates that I want to make to it, but this would generally be the Box List style view.