Animation, fade in/out

[milanp]

Now that Steven is back let's give him something to code.
Many of the other frontends meanwhile have some kind of effects for transitioning between the screens and/or some effects on showing text/images such as fade in/out/resize to full image/downsize.
Since there were no major complaints and real bugs for the core of Xlobby in the past months it is hightime to do this, now and finally.
Even SageMC has animations and it is more PVR and less frontend

[Marbles_00]

Animations would be cool. Maybe we can help Steve out by suggesting a possible standard format. This way he wouldn't have to worry about coding for all format types and concentrate on the most popular one. I for one am partial to avi or mpeg, but maybe gif images, Flash of Java animation would interface better with Xlobby.

What would other people prefer?

[milanp]

Flash support + built in transitions(fade in+fade out+zoom in/zoom out) for buttons and pictures will make me happy.

[Naylia]

as far as images go in addition to fade/zoom out/in i think i'd also like to have the ability to slide into it's box from up/down/left/right

[stevenhanna6]

this always seems to come up every few months, we have flash animations for backgrounds are very long time ago but it was just to process intensive...even for a fast cpu. There is animated gif support built into xlobby, just drop an animated gif in the button folder and use it as a button.

I get the basic idea of what you guys want, but it all really boils down the the fact I'm not using directx. There were a bunch of reasons I didnt pick directx...but I went by the point of no return a long time ago so I wont bore you with the reasons. Its just the nature of the beast I have created animations have to kept to an absolute minimum to none.

[milanp]

If everything else is not possible,can you reenable the flash background which you said was tried sometime. I've been using Xlobby for more than two years and I don't remember that feature.
Also I tried animated gif's as buttons a long time ago (approximately a year) and they only showed the first picture in the sequence.
If you can reenable the flash background (the systems are now much much faster) and implement the animated gifs it would suffice quite a lot of us users for sometime.
Please check if this can be done.....

[Colby]

If you can reenable the flash background (the systems are now much much faster) and implement the animated gifs it would suffice quite a lot of us users for sometime.

Animated backgrounds really bog down a system, its not really worth it. As far as speed is concerned I bench tested the animation on my system when it came out. 3.2 GHZ Hyperthreading, with 2 gig DDR400mhz ram, and a dual processor 400MHZ 256MB graphics card. It bogged down. Now I dont think computers have come leaps and bonds in hardware since then, unless your home theater pc is cutting edge I doubt the animations will be worthwhile.

Just my thoughts

[milanp]

I was actually thinking about more stuff supported like in
HeavyMetalFlash skin.
I like the way animations are implemented in that skin.
I like the speed of that skin (it is not slow at all) , but I what discourages me is that I cannot navigate with remote or keyboard. I don't know anything about navigation in flash and I didn't have enough time to look at the skin an see how animations are implemented.
I don't like the butterflies running around but that's my personal taste.
Anyway it is good example that there can be some kind of flash animations without too much wasting of CPU resources.
The concept for animating with flash is almost perfectly done in that skin, and I have no idea if navigation with keyboard/remote is easily solvable.

[rika]

agree with colby, one small gif (10 frames) in my skin took 70% of my 2.8 ghz intel after 2 minutes...

rika

[senovak]

I agree, I really like this for it's functionality not for the little image tricks.

[dalanik]

Agreed on flash animations - they really make system unbearably slow. GIFs were a little better, but they are (were) always buggy, in that the animation stops after certain time, so I stopped using them.

But screen transitions would be COOL. Just ordinary slide-in top/bottom/letf/right would be enough. C'mon it can't be that hard or CPU intensive, it's just moving some pixels around Even if it is CPU intensive, who cares, when you're switching screens in XLobby, PC isn't doing anything else, and transitions take like 2 or 3 seconds....

just my 2c worth...

D.

[m_ski]

milanp,

I am writing a new plugin you might well be interested in testing for me that does screen transition effects (fade/slide/wipe)
If you want to do some testing for me send me an email - mark at skilling dot me dot uk.

[milanp]

m_ski,

You should have my e-mail adress in your mailbox.
I'am waiting for testing when you are ready.