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Nostalgia Theme WIP


eatkinola

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*** 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.

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34 minutes ago, Rincewind said:

This has so much potential to be a fantastic theme, can't wait to see the finished article. Am I correct in thinking you need a single screenshot of every platform video with the screens cut out and saved as a transparent .PNG file

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.

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6 hours ago, Rincewind said:

I will do a few today and send them to you, the only problem doing it this way is that the screen grab will be 1920px x1080px and may not look as good on say a 4k scree

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.

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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.

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36 minutes ago, GreenGriffon said:

It just sort of looks like it's hanging there.

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.

59a1a7dbc68c9_NintendoGameCube.thumb.png.8a9283eaec6eac658a92e480b2704202.png59a1a7e1b616b_NintendoGameCube(bw).thumb.png.f76dae96cf13abcc7159ac14c86804b2.pnggs-test.thumb.jpg.fe4ab942501eae500bf410d029cad5b7.jpg

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1 hour ago, GreenGriffon said:

With the texture applied, it doesn't really look to me like the TV and console setup is sitting in a big empty room. It just sort of looks like it's hanging there.

I would skip the texture since it seems to ruin the whole illusion.

Agree, texture while nice looking does take away the illusion. 

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8 hours ago, Cookz718 said:

im in the process of working one out trying to make it look elegant / clean.. if u want to collab ?

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!

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