2019-01-26, 21:21
(2019-01-24, 22:02)Alanon Wrote: @justin150 Hello and welcome! What you're trying to accomplish is going to take some doing. Basically, the vast majority of home screen elements are colourable through one skin setting or another, so the elements like menu backgrounds, widget boxes, headers and menu boxes are basically just small white image files (look out for references like white.png, tile.png, tile_empty.png, half_tile.png and many others) stretched to proper dimensions and with a colour filter applied. What you'd have to do is go through the files and alter the background images to the ones you'd need.Firstly thank you for taking the time to respond.
For example, for altering the main menu background, look for "Home_Menu_BG_Big" in Includes_Home.xml, and for menu styles, search for the proper style comment in the same file. I'd wager that you'll have to tailor your images to fit the available user space. If you select a light/dark basic theme, the text should turn white/dark so you should be able to use a brighter chrome texture. You'll only have to alter the menu backgrounds and one tile style, the one which best fits the look you're after. This will break skin colour settings, but you can remove the texture colour diffusion just in case.
As it happened I had tried the idea of replacing white.png in "Home_Menu_BG_Big" but what seems to happen is that there is an order in which a screen image is laid down, almost like a series of layers. Deepest background layer is whatever happens to be your background image, next layer is the tiles and images inside the tiles, next layer is "Home_Menu_BG_Big" and final layer is home menu item text (if any). So if you replace white.png with an image of chicken wire (for example) you end up with the home menu tiles and any icons inside the tiles looking as though they are behind the chicken wire and any text looks to be in front of the chicken wire.
I have not tried to change the home menu tiles yet (delay due to mediocre artistic talents!) but I do worry about finding the same "image layering" problem ie if the tile is an image itself (say of a metal shield) rather than having a transparent centre what I will see if the tile image obscuring the relevant home menu icon - again it is import to ensure the tile is in the background and the home menu item icon is the foreground.
It may be what I am trying to do is just not possible with Kodi. If that is the case just let me out of my misery