Main Menu Wheel Background

[tcmt]

hey all of you,

 

my quest on my own custom theme (similar to the look of emulationstation) continues and once again i hit a problem where i can't come up with an solution.

 

i try to have a wheel background that basically is a transparent strip over the background.

 

like this (note that this is just a very quickly put together example of what i try to archive, pls ignore the artwork and pointer above the wheel)

 

 

my solution so far is to make the wheel background strip part of the background image itself, which worked so far.

 

now i created my custom fading transition .flv to play when the system is changed (and fades the background image out and in again) and of course the transparent strip/wheel background (as part of the background image) fades too, which i don't want. my next idea was to use one of the special artwork slots for the transparent strips but all special artwork is rendered above the wheel. so that won't work as well.

 

then i looked at dark13's awesome Aeon Nox theme again and realized that he's got a wheel background which stays above his transition .flv. (

)

 

so basically i'd like to know, how you'd archive that.

 

i hope i could make myself understandable at least a bit in terms of what im trying to archive (it often times is very hard for me to explain these things in english)

 

so if anyone can help me let me know.

 

thanks for reading and have a good one!

tim 

 

[tcmt]

k i just realised that dark13 uses a .swf file as background instead of a normal .png which i use. i believe that his .swf background is animated and basically includes the transition, which is very clever imo. i'll try to come up with something similar to integrate into my theme creation.

[Black Hazor]

k i just realised that dark13 uses a .swf file as background instead of a normal .png which i use. i believe that his .swf background is animated and basically includes the transition, which is very clever imo. i'll try to come up with something similar to integrate into my theme creation.

also u can use a smoothing effect on swf files so after the BG got streched in HS it doenst get pixelated

[dark13]

Yeah, the transition is inside the .swf background (it's an animated vector mask). In HS there are only 2 layers rendered UNDER the wheel: Background and Pointer.

I think that pointer layer, anyway, is rendered UNDER transitions so my best guess is you really need to create the transition inside a .swf Background.

.flv can be encoded with an alpha channel (trasparency, as you can see .flv main menu videos have trasparency) so you might create the transition with an alpha "hole" where the main bar and wheelart is. The only problem is you won't have fade-in/fade out on the bar itself.