Post by Moongaze on Apr 13, 2007 18:31:06 GMT -5
LunarSkin is going to be very simple. It grabs all of the action bar buttons that World of Warcraft uses (The bar that's embedded into the bottom bar of the interface, as well as the two bars on the right side of the screen, and the two additional bars above the bottom bar), and skins them.
That's it. Nothing more. Nothing less. All the original action bar buttons will turn into circles and use skins that you decide upon. Maybe even square skins... maybe I'll let users add a "shine" effect to all buttons. Who knows. But it will do nothing more than modify the ORIGINAL buttons.
There are action bar mod already out in the addon community, but these essentially destroy the original action bars that Blizzard has and creates their own layout and setup. While this is awesome for those who really like to modify their interface, it leaves people who like the original interface setup out in the cold. By using these action bar mods, and combining them with an addon such as cyCircled, users can have circular buttons and other shapes ... as well as skins of their choice. However, cyCircled relies on the usage of addons such as Bartender and Bongos.
People might consider me sick, but I do like the original layout that Blizzard designed. I like having the bars where they are ... I just can't stand the square look sometimes, and want something else. That's where this addon comes into play.
LunarSkin messes with the ORIGINAL Blizzard buttons. The default setup will change all buttons into circles, with the same type of border that the minimap buttons use. This makes the appearance still look like World of Warcraft, without all of the strange new skins and graphics that could be used.
As it stands, I have a functional version of LunarSkin, but it uses a badly designed circle border that is similar to the minimap border. I decided to use the official minimap button border that Blizzard uses for the tracking buttons, and I must say, it's pretty.
The mod works by hooking onto the original ActionButton code and removing some unwanted features with the skinning of the original buttons. It then attached its own graphics and would shrink the size of the icon graphic, so that it would fit inside the circular button. The image was essentially cut down in size by 40%. Although the button looks good afterwards, I did lose a little bit of the detail of the button icon, since it was made smaller. It was a necessary change ...
That is, until April 10th. While investigating new ways to create and modify buttons for LunarSphere, I came across a golden nugget in Blizzards interface code. The shrinking of the graphic no longer need to be so dramatic. In fact, I think I only need to shrink the graphic 5-10%. This is so that the borders don't hit each other ... but in all truth, I don't even need to shrink the image. I just want to make sure as much of it can be shown as possible. This new method eliminates the problem that plagues circular buttons: The circle is placed on top of a SQUARE graphic. Obviously, this could have an issue if the square edges extend past the circle, which is the case on some of the skins in cyCircled. However, the code Blizzard uses transforms the texture into a circle shape. No longer a square, the texture fits ANY circle, and looks pretty sweet.
Testing should be happening around the time the first stage of LunarSphere testing happens.
That's it. Nothing more. Nothing less. All the original action bar buttons will turn into circles and use skins that you decide upon. Maybe even square skins... maybe I'll let users add a "shine" effect to all buttons. Who knows. But it will do nothing more than modify the ORIGINAL buttons.
There are action bar mod already out in the addon community, but these essentially destroy the original action bars that Blizzard has and creates their own layout and setup. While this is awesome for those who really like to modify their interface, it leaves people who like the original interface setup out in the cold. By using these action bar mods, and combining them with an addon such as cyCircled, users can have circular buttons and other shapes ... as well as skins of their choice. However, cyCircled relies on the usage of addons such as Bartender and Bongos.
People might consider me sick, but I do like the original layout that Blizzard designed. I like having the bars where they are ... I just can't stand the square look sometimes, and want something else. That's where this addon comes into play.
LunarSkin messes with the ORIGINAL Blizzard buttons. The default setup will change all buttons into circles, with the same type of border that the minimap buttons use. This makes the appearance still look like World of Warcraft, without all of the strange new skins and graphics that could be used.
As it stands, I have a functional version of LunarSkin, but it uses a badly designed circle border that is similar to the minimap border. I decided to use the official minimap button border that Blizzard uses for the tracking buttons, and I must say, it's pretty.
The mod works by hooking onto the original ActionButton code and removing some unwanted features with the skinning of the original buttons. It then attached its own graphics and would shrink the size of the icon graphic, so that it would fit inside the circular button. The image was essentially cut down in size by 40%. Although the button looks good afterwards, I did lose a little bit of the detail of the button icon, since it was made smaller. It was a necessary change ...
That is, until April 10th. While investigating new ways to create and modify buttons for LunarSphere, I came across a golden nugget in Blizzards interface code. The shrinking of the graphic no longer need to be so dramatic. In fact, I think I only need to shrink the graphic 5-10%. This is so that the borders don't hit each other ... but in all truth, I don't even need to shrink the image. I just want to make sure as much of it can be shown as possible. This new method eliminates the problem that plagues circular buttons: The circle is placed on top of a SQUARE graphic. Obviously, this could have an issue if the square edges extend past the circle, which is the case on some of the skins in cyCircled. However, the code Blizzard uses transforms the texture into a circle shape. No longer a square, the texture fits ANY circle, and looks pretty sweet.
Testing should be happening around the time the first stage of LunarSphere testing happens.