Skinning Synthesia - Skinbox v0.2

Lemo · Post by **Lemo** » 08-26-11 11:57 am

lol
but what do you mean by "those pics in the Keyboard Settings menu" ?

aria1121 · Post by **aria1121** » 08-26-11 3:30 pm

dunno i mean those cable pics

@Nicholas
I mean are there any more resources to edit? Like can we mod the demo songs or something? Havn't you used ResHacker before?

Post by **Nicholas** » 08-26-11 3:57 pm

aria1121 wrote:Havn't you used ResHacker before?

Well, sure... but I'm the one putting the resources there in the first place, so I know what's in there already.

Modding the demo songs is trickier. The titles are hard-coded. So it'd show the same name but be a different song. Also the Learning Pack features wouldn't work with replacement songs, so all the information on that screen would sort of become a lie.

Lemo · Post by **Lemo** » 08-26-11 4:01 pm

lol Nicholas doesn't need ResHacker to edit his own source code

anyway, did you try that 7zip extract of Synthesia for mac?
those cable pics are in there and called midiConnectionsStandard.tga
like I said I chose to tweak 74 files only for that skin, but you can tweak the ones you like
last time I checked there was 122 image files

aria1121 · Post by **aria1121** » 08-26-11 4:13 pm

Soon. Soon there will be an awesome skin for Synthesia before that automatic stuff comes out will be there. Soon.

kiwi · Post by **kiwi** » 10-08-12 4:52 am

I have some times now

But maybe i need to wait for to make a skin? Because ui is curently revamped.
So do i need to wait a little for to skinning?
I don't want take one day of skinning if the work is outdated...

Lemo · Post by **Lemo** » 10-10-12 8:22 pm

I suppose this method still works a bit with the new UI, but you may have to extract again the resources from the .exe before because it probably changed a lot since last time...
Didn't get the time to play with those "official" xml files (they look complicated^^) but I guess it's a better idea to start working with it if you can already change the graphics and stuff like that
Or you can wait if it ever gets simpler I don't know :p

Post by **Nicholas** » 10-10-12 9:49 pm

Lemo wrote:(they look complicated^^)

Oh, they're no worse than HTML right now.

And while you could probably cobble together some GUI editing tool (something like Glade) to work with the files, I'm not expecting to anytime soon. So they won't be getting much easier for a while. Having separate data files was a huge leap in terms of development speed for me, but I'm not convinced all the effort of an editing tool would pay itself back much faster.

Besides, the cool inheritance stuff you can do in there would be tricky to model using an editor.

Pianotehead · Post by **Pianotehead** » 10-10-12 9:54 pm

That you should mention Glade, is kind of a deja vu for me - last semester the teacher in my GUI course made us work with it. I never got the hang of it.

Post by **Nicholas** » 10-10-12 10:42 pm

I used it quite a bit back around 2006'ish. It's super helpful if you're doing a lot of work with GTK. Looks like it's matured a lot, too. Probably a lot nicer to use now.

kiwi · Post by **kiwi** » 11-11-14 6:23 am

Have retried with the new version it has some strange effects

By the way i can't anymore acces to the tga files in ressource hacker.

Post by **Nicholas** » 11-11-14 8:01 am

I haven't tried, but as far as Synthesia's side is concerned, nothing has changed with the way the graphics assets are stored.

kiwi · Post by **kiwi** » 11-11-14 8:23 am

Yes the same arborescence but i can't replace the tga i have only hex dump in ressource hacker.

k1ngdv · Post by **k1ngdv** » 03-11-15 10:33 pm

Sorry for interrupting an old thread, but I was wondering if it's possible to change the colors of the active keys (orange, green, blue etc...)?

I know you can change the colors of the notes falling by editing the tga files, but what about the color of the keys?

Also, what's the best program to edit tga files? I'm using photoshop but they're seems to be some issues with the alpha layers when saving them down.

Thanks in advance!

Post by **Nicholas** » 03-12-15 12:50 am

The key colors are hard-coded, unfortunately. The good news is that we just solved the final technology hurdle preventing totally custom note colors. It won't be a matter of texture-editing anymore. I'm hoping that will make it into Synthesia 12.

For TGA files, Photoshop is a little quirky. It's because TGA doesn't treat alpha the same as other file formats like PNG. The difference is premultiplied alpha vs. non-premultiplied. The way to do it with TGA is to treat things like you don't have alpha at all. Fill in every pixel as though you were working with a BMP or something. Then, create a new channel (in the Channels pane) along with the R, G, and B channels. What you paint into that channel is what will be treated as alpha. Finally, when you Save As a TGA, make sure the "Alpha Channels" box is checked in the file box. In the TGA-specific prompt that follows, it's a nice idea to choose "Compress (RLE)" to keep file sizes a little smaller.

I've used Photoshop for every single TGA in Synthesia, so I can definitely attest to this procedure working.

k1ngdv · Post by **k1ngdv** » 03-12-15 2:18 am

Thanks Nick! This was incredibly helpful. Much appreciated.