Skin System

[peppy]

For Marcin

Pages:

• Skin listing page. Should allow users to view all public skins (and also all of their own skins).
• Skin information page. What you get when you click a listing entry. Gives you options to clone the skin (make your own copy of it to further modify), download, watch preview videos etc.
• Skin creation page. Choose skin name, description, preview image, upload skin elements.

Things to consider:

• Skins should be versioned. A creator should be able to easily add a new version of a skin based on the previous one.
• Users should be able to set private or public for a skin, and also decide whether others are allowed to use their elements in further skins.
• When creating a skin from scratch, a user will be able to upload an element of choose from a listing of all elements from skins which have allowed use of individual elements.
• Eventually we'll want all the skin.ini settings also modifiable via a web interface.

[PieInOblivion]

I think it could be nice that when a user visits a skins download page that it's thumbnail or preview picture be a server generated one. This preview image would be consistent across all skins (But will show the selected skin instead) and I think could look quite nice.

Eg: http://puu.sh/k2Utb.png
The red line is just to split the two and show how both are the same but with different skins.

[peppy]

This is planned, yes.

[Nicarim]

That was planned before, yeah,

[PieInOblivion]

May I ask what's missing? Perhaps I could contribute?

[Nicarim]

@PieInOblivion nothing is done yet, it's just a draft until I pick it up (probably tomorrow)

[PieInOblivion]

If any assistance or errors are found or needed, I'll attempt best I can to help.

[pixeldesu]

Skins should be versioned.

I think this would be solved the easiest way with giving the users another variable in the skin.ini called SkinVersion or Revision or something alike. This then could be combined with...

Eventually we'll want all the skin.ini settings also modifiable via a web interface.

...so people can just upload the new elements and change this on-the-fly, if they (for example) forget to change the version number in the skin.

[peppy]

Versioning is most definitely planned to be part of the system.

[PieInOblivion]

Am I correct in saying that if no VersionNumber is given, the client or server (when uploading) will auto assign one?

[Nicarim]

db01b8f
Please check if I forgot about something.
Also I'm not sure how should elements that have more than one frame (are animation) be handled, any ideas?

[PieInOblivion]

So eg: 'scorebar-colour-0' to 'scorebar-colour-10'

• I would take it simple and just use the first 'Frame' of the animation and display that on the preview.

OR

• Generate a GIF, detecting/counting how many frames there are max of any animation, and create the GIF accordingly. Perhaps with a limit of 'XXX' frames in the GIF in case someone trolls and creates a purposefully long animation to use lots of bandwidth.

[ameliaikeda]

@PieInOblivion bandwidth isn't really an issue for that to be honest. Just make the gif the same overall length in seconds.

[Nicarim]

@ameliaikeda @PieInOblivion in old version of that site, there was javascript in place that iterated over every frame in img tag so it looked like it was animation.

[TobySchoon]

I think this is a great idea! You could also put your own item / photo in for other people to use. But it would have to be cropped. But otherwise, if you wanted me to, i would be glad to put photos in for when the project is done!