Concept - Widescreen Game Themes

[Styphelus]

Since no one is creating themes in widescreen, even when 80% of us are playing on widescreens, I decided to make my own. It's really easy - create theme at 1920x1080, rename all photoshop layers properly (Artwork1, Artwork2, Background, Video...). Resize theme to 1024, 768, import PSD into hypertheme.

There could be a 4:3 and a 16:9 version for every theme. Takes an addition 5 min (if that) to resize a 16:9 theme to 4:3.

This is just a sample of what I'm working on. These are by no means finished and the video borders need work so I'm not posting them. They are not THK quality but they are better than the low res 4:3 stretched themes everyone is stuck creating. Hopefully this gets more people moving towards creating widescreen themes.

By the way, converting existing ones is a bit tricky. Sometimes you need to find the artwork in higher resolution and recreate the theme like I did for Crysis and Tomb Raider. Some of the existing themes can be sharpened if the artwork was good to begin with. I resized the artwork for Dolphin Blue and that came out decent.

I left the game name at the bottom left as proof these are hyperspin screenshots.

The graphics come out looking much better than the current 4:3 themes, even without using the swf method used in the unified theme which is really time consuming.

[djvj]

Nice job. I totally agree with you, all theme creators should focus on widescreen themes and resize to 4:3 afterwards.

Sent from my Samsung S3 using Tapatalk

[dark13]

I'm doing some test with .swf as far as I've seen you can avoid resizing in flash, you can prepare everything in photoshop and have a better image quality. Save as .png in photoshop, open it in flash and set this properties for all objects and export as image (swf)

It seems that flash image smooting simply works better. I don't have a 1080p screen to test out but I guess there won't be much difference between a 1080p image and a 1024*768 image. In the very end flash will output a 1024*768 image.

[Styphelus]

I did that for the unified themes and it's a lot of work. You basically need to export every single image to flash and resize it to a 1024x768 format in flash and than import every individual image to hypertheme.

[dark13]

Yeah, but even if you don't resize in flash (it's a bit tricky) but you import pre-resized .png in flash they will look better. Just see for yourself, load both artwork in hypertheme. It's the same png image: one is a .png and the other is a .png embedd in a swf. The swf simply looks better on a 16:9 screen...

test swf.zip

[gadget2k]

I've tried to create some themes in widescreen but It's a bit difficult to animate them in hypertheme. Hypertheme only properly let you animate them in 1024x768 format. As I said before I've tried but everything seem to be a little off. BTW I see you did a widescreen version of the Bioshock I created.

[Styphelus]

That was you? Yeah I like a lot of the themes that have already been created. I just don't like the stretched look. I goggled the artwork in higer res and maintained the same layout as the 4:3 version. That theme is perfect!

I know what you mean about animating them. For Virtua Tennis I wanted the ball to spin and if you do that it gets all skewed. I settled for a hoover effect. Still, I would rather have less animations than having themes stretched and at lower res. Maybe I'm alone in this one.

[SuprVgeta]

Very nice, look really good.

[sreisig1]

Nice work. I agree, the themes look much better.

[THK]

Would be nice to have the actual FE & HT coded so there's no need for a work around. Would also be nice to have bezels incorporated into the FE so we can still use the old 4:3 themes without stretching or redoing the themes. Yeah I know.... fat chance. But I'll probably be keeping to 4:3 until this happens.

They are not THK quality

Thanks for somehow making my work into a quality standard

[Agrajag]

I live in hope that Bill will come back and surprise us all one day by releasing v2.0 but in the meantime any efforts from the community to provide widescreen support are very gratefully received!

[Pyramid_Head]

I highly doubt HS 2.0 will ever see the light of day. I'm looking forward to seeing what GameEx Evo will bring. Might end up switching to that while still using RL.0

[damageinc86]

I hope someday it get's finished and released. But in the meantime I have no problem waiting, because the current version is still absolutely amazing IMO

[shitoken]

Have this project been released?