Theme editor

[mviars]

Is there a guide for using the theme editor? I did try looking around first but nothing that seems to really go over it well enough for me.

 

 

[Draco1962]

There is a Theme Editor thread in the GameEx Media Projects subforum, however no guide on how to use. As you will discover, most of the work takes place in GIMP or Photoshop with the arrangement of system elements and fonts via Theme Editor.

[mviars]

OK thanks for the reply.

[RedDog]

I started tinkering with the Theme editor about a year and a half ago completely from scratch. It turned out better than I had hoped it would, so I did post it here (shameless little plug). I admit that a guide would have been nice, but with the forum threads, asking questions, and a bit of time working with it, you can get a handle on it. What I did was grab a theme I liked, loaded it up in the editor, and then started poking around to see what was what. After that, I started altering images to see what effects I could do.

One bit of knowledge that will be helpful is to know that there are two different theme versions that can be created: Version 2 and Version 4. Version 4 has a bit more stuff. Off the top of my head, the things that come to mind are the inclusion of the title image (v2 only has the snap image), more menu options, and I believe popup descriptions and game ratings. Of course, the editor supports both and when you create a brand new theme, you will be prompted to choose. You can determine what version a theme uses by opening the Theme.ini file in a text editor. The version will be listed at the top.

Also, themes can be created with one background that is used for every page in GameEx or you can use customized background for almost everything. Note that a few pages (like steam) do share backgrounds with other pages. I do not recall which ones those are at the moment, but there aren't many.

Another bit of knowledge that is helpful to know is that png files allow for transparency while jpg do not (in case you are new to image editing).

And another thing I did when I decided to to the theme was to create a thread in the GameEx Media Project section of the forum. That way I could get feedback on what I was doing and ask questions that related to what I was trying to do. The feedback was really helpful. Even if you don't plan on releasing the theme to the world, you might consider tdoing something similar.

Anyway, hope it helps.

[mviars]

OK thanks RedDog! I did try tinkering with it a little but got frustrated and took a break. I will try again soon. Oh and its good to see another SWFL person on the forums. Sunny beaches for us huh?

[RedDog]

3 minutes ago, mviars said:

Oh and its good to see another SWFL person on the forums. Sunny beaches for us huh?

Well, right now it's pretty kick a**! Of course, in 6 months...