wheres best place to start...

[s1m0nw]

hey guys

was sitting here wondering where would the best place to look at designing skins??

cheers

[stevejo]

Start by looking at recent skins that have been made , i was advised that cool tv guide is a good starting point to learn

[rossi2000]

i would say theres 2 parts to it. graphic design and coding.

start with the skin.xml, look at it, read it and you should hopefully start to understand whats going on,
start to change things and look at it, its a learning curve.

a firm grasp of mathematics will make it abit easier.

[Larry-G]

I'm no skinner but i know there is a serious lack of info out there for those wishing to get involved, all those i do know who have created skins started by looking at existing skins and playing about with them. A good place to start would be to FTP into your receiver ( make a backup first ) then copy the skin files to your pc and see what you can do. be prepared for a lot of crashes and reboots until you get the nack of it as it's a very long road once yo start down it.

[rossi2000]

you can be sure of crashes

[s1m0nw]

haha I can imagine there would the LOADS of crashes eh

[Larry-G]

yep there will be loads of crashes but I hope there comes a day where we have multiple skinners who can share their knowledge and post tips etc to help others etc.

[seame]

I started messing with an infobar the other day and to start with it looked like Chinese to me, I downloaded a program called e2skinner which made it a bit easier to read and understand. Once it was layed out clearer for me it was a matter of using a bit of head wrecking mathematics and I was surprising pleased with the outcome. I'll upload the program to the site shortly.

Edit

After reading through the site it seems that e2skinner isn't compatible with vix skins but it certainly helped me understand what was in the .xml file.

e2skinner2.1.0.0_testing.rar

[Larry-G]

I started messing with an infobar the other day and to start with it looked like Chinese to me, I downloaded a program called e2skinner which made it a bit easier to read and understand. Once it was layed out clearer for me it was a matter of using a bit of head wrecking mathematics and I was surprising pleased with the outcome. I'll upload the program to the site shortly.

e2skinner is a good program to get your teeth into when starting out but it's no longer compatible with the ViX skins such as ViX Night HD.

[Rob van der Does]

There's really one good starting point: take an existing skin, put it in a folder with a different name and start modding. You'll find you way around soon enough.
My own starting point was my wish to add the orbital position to the channel list.
In case anything strange happens, (and it will ) just read the debuglog. So always have an FTP-client open in order to be able to have a quick look.
And if the box doesn't start or gets into a crashloop: just rename the skin.xml so E2 will fall back on the default skin.

Enjoy!