Jump to content
LaunchBox Community Forums

Recommended Posts

CriticalZone / CriticalZone - BlueBox

View File

Here you can download alternative versions of the CriticalZoneV2 theme that comes bundled with every LaunchBox installation.

CriticalZone is a BigBox theme designed for the usage of widescreen platform videos and utilizes videos as backgrounds.

This theme was designed for widescreen displays with 16:9 aspect ratios and optimized for a display resolution of 1920x1080. It will also work with other widescreen resolutions and 16:10 aspect ratios but it may not look as polished.

 

Available Versions:

- CritcalZoneV2 - BlueBox: A blue color variant of CriticalZoneV2. It features blue texts instead of green and has a different Default background created by @SentaiBrad

- BackgroundVideoOnly: All Views, except the TextList Views, will only use video loops as backgrounds. Also available as BlueBox version.

- BackgroundFanartOnly: All Views will only use Fanart images as backgrounds. Also available as BlueBox version. -> Use this version if you have performance problems!

- 1.8: The original and now old version of CriticalZone. It's officially EOL and won't get supported by me in any way. It's just still here for archiving reasons.

There’s also a red 80’s/Cyberpunk themed version of CriticalZone called “CityHunter”. It’s maintained by @keltoigael and can be found here:

 

How to install:

Just download the version of choice and extract the archive into:

“..\LaunchBox\Themes\”

Open the Options menu in BigBox -> go to “Views” and change the Theme to the version you just have installed.

 

IMPORTANT: CriticalZone V2 requires LaunchBox v7.11 or higher!

 

Known issues:

- The description texts in all Platform Views and CoverFlowWithDetails Games View won’t fill the whole space of the descriptions box when you use CriticalZone with a higher DPI setting than 100% or a lower display resolution than 1902x1080. It gets progressively worse the higher the DPI settings and/or lower the resolution is.

 

Thanks & Credits:

 

Thanks to @SentaiBrad for creating the new Default background video for the BlueBox variant.

 

Background video of the standard version: In The Deep - FREE Video Background Loop HD 1080p by NIZ.co (http://niz.co/wp/)


 

  • Like 13
Link to comment
Share on other sites

Thank you all for your kind words. I'm really happy that you guys like it that much :)

 

@shadowblind Platform views and games views are completely separated, so no.

But I’ve created an alternative version of the theme for you which has the games wheel view replaced with the simple one form the platforms. It was just a simple copy and paste task to accomplish this, so no biggie.

Here you go: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B_6XLOBnGwlUU3NXa2Q5UTkyUnc

 

@Maddoc1007 Sure, go ahead. I wouldn’t even have come that far with this theme without copying and learning stuff from other themes ;)

Just be aware that this method has an ugly bug (which is known by Microsoft since years, but they don’t seem to care to fix it…). When the background video starts again from the beginning than you will see some kind of a black border around your other video. I solved that by simply fading out my background video to hide that effect. Just test it yourself and you will see what I mean.

 

  • Like 3
Link to comment
Share on other sites

@CriticalCid Thank you very much it is very much appreciated a BIG BIG KUDOS TO YOU!

 

I just replaced in my theme

<transitions:TransitionPresenter TransitionSelector="{Binding BackgroundTransitionSelector}" Content="{Binding BackgroundView}" Height="{Binding ElementName=Canvas, Path=ActualHeight}" Width="{Binding ElementName=Canvas, Path=ActualWidth}" IsContentVideo="true" />

With your code

<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/Glass/Videos/BackgroundVideo/Platforms.mp4" Storyboard.TargetName="BackgroundVideo" RepeatBehavior="Forever"/>
                                </Storyboard>
                            </BeginStoryboard>
                        </EventTrigger.Actions>
                    </EventTrigger>
                </MediaElement.Triggers>
            </MediaElement>
        </Grid>

And put your background video in my theme video folder loaded up BigBox let it loop through a few times but didn't see any black border showing on the video.  Again thank you very much your a gentleman.  KUDOS AGAIN EXCELLENT WORK.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

@Maddoc1007 Like I said, you can’t see it with my background video as the video fades to black at the end of the video. Here’s the unedited version of the video without the fading for you to try: https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B_6XLOBnGwlULXY3SmppNDJwWkU

 

@djwar No they aren’t included.

The videos similar to the MAME and N64 ones will hopefully be available soon (can’t tell you when though, as other people are involved in that process as well)

 

NES, Mega Drive and PSP are from @BakerMan. If you are using the latest LB beta than you can get them directly through LaunchBox itself. (Tools -> Download Platform Theme Videos)

 

SNES and PC are from @nyny77. You have to download them manually and replace them with your current platform videos in “..\LaunchBox\Videos\Platforms”. You can find them here:

 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Quote

This is a fantastic theme! I do have a couple of issues that I wanted to point out. First, in the main menu (shown below) the video seems to be off-centered. Is there any way to fix this? Also, I'm not sure if it's just me but in this same particular menu, the wheel has some rather noticeable lag when scrolling from side to side. Hopefully this can be worked out, or it may be an issue with bigbox itself?

@bundangdonI can't answer you directly in the review section, so I have to do it here.

The off-center issue with 4:3 videos is a bug with the VLC engine that I can’t fix, unfortunately. You have to use platform videos in 16:9 aspect ratio to have the videos centered, sorry for that. @Jason Carr already knows about it, but I don't know when he can come around to fix this.

Regarding the lagging issue. What Video engine are you using? VLC works with my theme way faster on the transitions than WMP, so if you are using WMP than try to switch it to VLC. If that doesn’t help try to play around with the transitions.

EDIT: Maybe you're interested in some technical info as well. The lagging issues with WMP occur because the background video will always be played through WMP (can't change that fact) and the engine seems to have problems playing 2 videos simultaneously

  • Like 2
Link to comment
Share on other sites

12 hours ago, CriticalCid said:

Thank you all for your kind words. I'm really happy that you guys like it that much :)

 

@shadowblind Platform views and games views are completely separated, so no.

But I’ve created an alternative version of the theme for you which has the games wheel view replaced with the simple one form the platforms. It was just a simple copy and paste task to accomplish this, so no biggie.

Here you go: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B_6XLOBnGwlUU3NXa2Q5UTkyUnc

 

 

Woo! Thank you, excellent customer service, sir :D

Link to comment
Share on other sites

my background video plays ok and at the end it stops and does not play again it wont loop. is there a setting i need to do?. brill theme tho matey. and also on my other machine i have LB version 6.9 and the background video wont play at all even when i change the setting like u say to do.

Edited by andyco47
Link to comment
Share on other sites

Join the conversation

You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.

Guest
Unfortunately, your content contains terms that we do not allow. Please edit your content to remove the highlighted words below.
Reply to this topic...

×   Pasted as rich text.   Paste as plain text instead

  Only 75 emoji are allowed.

×   Your link has been automatically embedded.   Display as a link instead

×   Your previous content has been restored.   Clear editor

×   You cannot paste images directly. Upload or insert images from URL.

×
×
  • Create New...