theme CriticalZone / CriticalZone - BlueBox

[y2guru]

@CriticalCid  You know how much I love this theme, but i was wondering how much effort would it be (for someone like me) to transform this Platform view to the proposed look (see 2nd Image)

 

[CriticalCid]

Unfortunately it wouldn’t be that easy for someone who has no clue about the basics in XAML because you would need to restructure the whole View in order to do this.

[y2guru]

In my case its more to do with understanding Visual Studio 2017, I'm old school  VB5/6 hehehehehe,  I had opened your theme in VS 2017 but I was getting so many reference errors to ao.bigbox.themer the markup presentation would not work so I gave up.

[CriticalCid]

I can’t help you with VS because I only use Notepad++ for all of my theming.

To change the View to the one in your screenshot you would have to completely redefine all Grids, re-assign and resize all elements and remove a lot of stuff. Basically you would end up with a complete different View.

Jason made a great tutorial series on the basics of Bigbox theming:

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL6pTDaHeAz-X8yNgOD3DPxUf1gaB2FLzb

[y2guru]

Cid, its good to know that you used Notepad++ to do all your work because that's exactly the approach I am going to take, so you've given me hope.  By the way, that's impressive !

 

Jason's video was what prompted me to install VS 2017 :-) ill give it another look though.

 

 

[LogicalEgo]

19 minutes ago, CriticalCid said:

 

I can’t help you with VS because I only use Notepad++ for all of my theming.

To change the View to the one in your screenshot you would have to completely redefine all Grids, re-assign and resize all elements and remove a lot of stuff. Basically you would end up with a complete different View.

Jason made a great tutorial series on the basics of Bigbox theming:

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL6pTDaHeAz-X8yNgOD3DPxUf1gaB2FLzb

To quote Cid, I also do all my edits in Notepad++, I have never been able to setup VS17 correctly for whatever reason but I find its pretty easy to open up NP++, make quick changes, launch bigbox, repeat.

[eatkinola]

1 minute ago, keltoigael said:

To quote Cid, I also do all my edits in Notepad++, I have never been able to setup VS17 correctly for whatever reason but I find its pretty easy to open up NP++, make quick changes, launch bigbox, repeat.

So I'll third that. Even plain old notepad works fine. There's no need to compile a theme, so no compelling reason to use VS for theming. I only use VS if I'm working on a plugin.

[y2guru]

Guys, that's great to hear and very inspiring.  I'll continue down the path of using Notepad++ and google syntax etc.. and see what I can hack together. 

[y2guru]

Well... like I said, you inspired me and I learned a few things along the way. I am far from creating my own Themes but I'm certainly blown away by the patience and dedication to those that do.

I made the code tweaks (a lot of trial and error) and you're probably asking yourselves.. OK what is he going to do with all that real estate.   well I am going to place a long video loop of Gen 1 Transformers

[CriticalCid]

You don’t know how happy I am to hear that I’ve inspired you to tinker around with BigBox theming! There aren’t many theme creators around here and every creative person who is willing to learn is a huge win for this community in my book.

Also it’s quite impressive how fast you managed to edit the View. Great job!

[LogicalEgo]

39 minutes ago, y2guru said:

Well... like I said, you inspired me and I learned a few things along the way. I am far from creating my own Themes but I'm certainly blown away by the patience and dedication to those that do.

I made the code tweaks (a lot of trial and error) and you're probably asking yourselves.. OK what is he going to do with all that real estate.   well I am going to place a long video loop of Gen 1 Transformers

Oh yeah.

 

[y2guru]

Cheers @CriticalCid   I'm a lot more knowledgeable now than I was at 6am this morning, so if/when I have a creative spark for a theme I wont be overwhelmed to give it a go.

(I'm a developer, Windows/Web is not my forte though)

 

[y2guru]

@keltoigael  now that's awesome!

[y2guru]

Since I updated the view on my desktop I figured I might as well adapt it for my GPD Win 10, so here it is...

 

[CriticalCid]

Updated to v2.2!

Changelog:

v2.2 - LB v7.15 Beta (12/03/2017)
Updated: @eatkinola’s video engine for the background videos was updated to the latest version. 
	It now uses WMP or VLC (prior it only used WMP) based on your "Video Playback Engine" settings in BigBox. If you have performance problems try to change the video engine first and see if that helps.

I think the changelog is pretty much self-explanatory, huge thanks to @eatkinola for constantly working on refining the engine!

I'm really interested to hear from you guys how the new version performs for you, please let me know

[neil9000]

@CriticalCid, the download button doesn't list a version 2.2, do I just grab the normal v2 version?

[CriticalCid]

Yes, I don't keep the sub-version numbers in the title anymore. All v2 archives were updated to 2.2

[neil9000]

Cool, cheers ill grab it now.  

[kmoney]

@CriticalCid I have modified one of the views in your theme v2 a little bit and was wondering if it would be fine to just update the plugins folder to get the new update or would I have to modify xaml as well?

[CriticalCid]

Unfortunately you would need to edit the XAML as well because @eatkinola changed some of the syntax that is used with his plug-in.