[Livin]

let me see if i have this right...

<imagepath>home-shutdown</imagepath>
= looks in directory <skin>\media\home-shutdown

<timeperimage>5000</timeperimage>
= image is on screen for 5 seconds

<fadetime>2000</fadetime>
= image fade out and in is 2 seconds

is the 'time' in <visible effect="fade" time="200"> still necessary? if yes, what is it for?

thanks for adding this!!!

[BritneysPAIRS]

that will stop it from being 100percent visible when you go to that button. eg from button before it will fade to next one otherwise it would just stepin and then after 5 secs fade to next one.

[jmarshall]

affini:

correct - the <visible> tags are only needed if you want to control the visibility of the entire control. it has no effect on the slideshow aspect.

also, there's a couple more tags just been added:

<keepaspectratio>true</keepaspectratio>

will scale the image up and then crop it so that it's aspect ratio is correct, and so that there are no black bars on the image.

<randomize>true</randomize>

you can guess that one

cheers,
jonathan

[Livin]

jm... this is truely great work!

[Livin]

this is fantastic... i'd think animations would work if you had overlapping fade in and out

[KoTiX]

hi jonathan (wellcome back on business :d )
are each image unloaded from memory everytime a new one is showed?

i'm thinking this as a way to create animations using pngs instead of gif images, as png have transparency. :p

[BritneysPAIRS]

tested with cvs running 28 diff xprs (comes to about 75megs) all 28 varations work like a dream.

unable to fault code at all

[Livin]

will this work if we zip/rar the folders?

[KoTiX]

i made some tests and i'm really impressed of the results:
i was able to reproduce an animation made of 300 sequential png images (842x480 each)for a total of 98 mbytes folder without any loss of memory!!
i could even reproduce the animation from "invader" wmp skin,
http://www.theskinsfactory.com/skinsfa....&id=153
i only wish  it was transparent and not pinky background :p (and it doesn't loop)

i tryed to zip the folder ot to create an xpr file from all the pngs but it didn't work.
i know this is probably not the appropriated use of this feature but it surely work better and have less loading time than gif images

[jmarshall]

you can't zip/rar, but you can pack the images into the .xpr file (either into textures.xpr, or use a themed .xpr file on top of the normal one)

i probably won't add separate *.xpr just for these controls - it doesn't really improve the speed all that much, and takes that much longer to change the images involved from a users perspective. using the themes would be the best way to deal with these imo.

and yeah, it unloads the previous image as soon as the current one is fully faded in.

cheers,
jonathan

[KoTiX]

jm could you add a tag for enable/disable looping?
(if it is easy and quick to do) something like
<repeat>yes/no<repeat>
or
<loop>yes/no<loop>
default "yes" and if "no" is selected show the sequence but leave the last image always showed.

this will let me play a lot of more with animations
cheers :d

[aHorseofCourse]

great feature, jonathan. but i'm wondering why (at least on my set-up) the folder of .png images don't override the images from the textures.xpr file: for me they appear together, smooth transitions and all, with chokemaniac's images appearing before mine. obviously it's checking and loading images from both locations. is there a way to make it either/or?

[BritneysPAIRS]

set the randomise tag, or change the folder location of the multimage tags. l)

[jmarshall]

it follows the same rules as everywhere else: it first looks in <currenttheme>.xpr, then in textures.xpr, then for files. if you don't want to use the packed textures, either repack it without them, create a theme (if they're found in the theme pack, it doesn't look in textures.xpr), or place the files in a different folder and change home.xml to suit.

kotix: sounds like it could be useful - once again, you guys come up with stuff i didn't intend that makes things way more flexible than i imagined!

cheers,
jonathan

[aHorseofCourse]

thanks (as ever) for the speedy reply, jonathan. creating a new folder and pointing the home.xml to it did the trick.
just when i think you've made xbmc as good as it can possibly be you go and make it better . . .