issues with hardcoded skin behaviors

[Killarny]

Hi all..

I have been working on a skin, and I have run across an issue where behaviors that are hardcoded into the skinning engine interfere with my desired results.

In the settings category window (window id 12, SettingsCategory.xml) the button area controls are automatically grayed when navigation is moved off of them into the settings items that they reveal when activated. I have not found any way to change this in the wiki documents, and Jezz_X mentioned that the behavior is hardcoded.

Here is the category button as it appears when focused:
http://img229.imageshack.us/img229/9747/xbmcsettingscategorybutbz7.png (http://img229.imageshack.us/my.php?image=xbmcsettingscategorybutbz7.png)

And here as it appears after moving to the right to focus an item in the category of settings revealed by the button:
http://img146.imageshack.us/img146/6571/xbmcsettingscategorybutaf2.png (http://img146.imageshack.us/my.php?image=xbmcsettingscategorybutaf2.png)

So, as far as I can tell, there is no way to modify this behavior. The result is that my skin has unintended visuals which deviate from the look and feel of the rest of my design.

If there is a way to modify this behavior, I would be very happy if someone could point it out to me - perhaps I have completely overlooked something?

[Killarny]

Oops, I messed up the image links. I don't see a way to edit my original post, so...

Edit: Image links fixed in first post..

[jmarshall]

No, there's no way to change the behaviour. If you have ideas as to how it could be achieved to allow flexibility, then obviously I'm open to suggestions.

BTW: Images still don't work, but I know what you're talking about - effectively it renders the focused image at 50% opacity.

[Killarny]

jmarshall: thanks for the quick reply..

How about a third texture for buttons, a <textureselected> perhaps.

Although, it seems like this situation doesn't justify a new texture - maybe just a tag to disable the special rendering. But then how does the user differentiate at a glance where their current focus is?

It's getting really late for me, my brain feels like pudding - I'll think on this some more. Thanks for being receptive :)

[Jezz_X]

My thoughts on it is add these to the button control
<textureactivenofocus>
<textureactivefocus>
and a boolean
<active>contidtion</active>

and then we can use it for skin settings

But I guess a simpler way is let use use ToggleButton for it and the <usealttexture>-</usealttexture> bit is the not activated one and xbmc would set the toggle on use normal and alt with old to define the activated state

[jmarshall]

Togglebutton sounds like a good solution. Will hack it up this evening.

Cheers,
Jonathan

[Killarny]

Thanks for the replies guys.. I look forward to seeing how it works out with the change :)