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Ambience Theme (initial testing)


Grila

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Here's the beginnings of a new theme that I am working on for my personal setup. It's based off igarikoitz's unfinished Aura 4K theme for the RetroFE front end. The minute I saw his early working designs I fell in love with the style and decided it was how I wanted my setup to look. So, I set out on the adventure of seeing if I could port it to BigBox while keeping it as smooth as his work.

The problem I initially faced was getting the fanart from the index+1 and index-1 of the selected game. Luckily for me, @Jason Carr listens to his community and added the plugin system a while back :) The second, and ongoing problem task is finding fanart that I like and then cropping it to 1080x1080 to make sure it looks good. It's a tedious process, but worth it when you see the results.

The scrolling performance is better than I expected, since the cache isn't getting used because all the images are called from the plugin (because of the index+1 and index-1). It's actually very smooth on my main rig, and performs quite well even on my dev machine with integrated graphics.

I'm off to a good start, but still have some tweaking to do. Here's a little preview:

 

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31 minutes ago, alexis524 said:

@Grila,

thanks for showing. I'd definitely use this as my main theme! Side question, where do you find your fanart? I love alot of the art shown for individual titles as you scrolled through.

I'm going to release it for the community, but be aware that it will only work at 1920x1080 and it takes a lot time to get nice fanart for each title.

As for how I get my art...I scour the interwebz one game at a time by its title. Google Images (with a minimum size of 1600x1200), ArtStation, DeviantArt, etc. If I can't find any artwork, or any good quality artwork, then I atleast try to match the overall theme of the game and find something suitable.

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Actually I'm going to retract that comment and instead say:

I don't know if it will work correctly at any other resolution than 1920x1080 only because there are a lot of margins applied and from my experience, margins don't scale very well in XAML. Your mileage may vary. 

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Hello, I introduce myself: I am igarikoitz, creator of the themes Aurora, Aura and Aura 4K for RetroFE. 
I am pleased to see that you like my designs and that you have decided to create the theme Aura 4K for BigBox. I like how it looks, good job!
 

Edited by iGarikoitz
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Latest test and I think this thing is almost complete. This week I worked on swapping the screenshot with game-play videos, but I ran into some trouble. I could get the video to stop when the game was launched, but I was not able to get them to resume when exiting the game. So...I reverted to the screenshots for now until I can figure the video issue out.

 

Edited by Grila
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10 hours ago, ALIE said:

look absolutely gorgeous a little concerned how it looks for games out great artwork?.

might use it for a smaller focused LB build ?

Agreed ? This is a gorgeous looking theme, but I think there should be an option for the user to implement other (different) artwork such as the boxart, screenshot, gameplay video, etc.

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I understand, but this is for my personal collection.  I'm not concerned about other peoples collections. I'm only going t make it available to the community based on the previous replies. The plugin took a huge amount of effort, and honestly, I don't really care if it caters to everyone's wants/needs. 

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Point well taken and fully understood ? I just thought it could be a bit on the tedious (and time-consuming) side to hunt down all of that background fanart-artwork for so many games. Although (as it is now) It definitely would be suitable for a smaller collection

Edited by bundangdon
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1 hour ago, Suhrvivor said:

Can fanart already in the LaunchBox Database be used as the center image or do you need special ones for the theme?

All it uses is the fanart. If all you have is the default, then that's what is displayed. I just am making my own because I have OCD.

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