The latest ver is complete and availible along with a new website and instructions. Just load up the version you have, go to the instructions page and click HOME and it will give you the information.

Enjoy and please give me feedback!

Why is this so cumbersome.

It honestly doesnt seem to get anything done. And extremely user unfreindly.

All I want is to take a skin or one Ive already modded and drag somethings around or change some names and actions.

This doesnt seem to allow me to do any of it with any kind of ease whatsoever.

Then program your own damn skin editor.

TS

What I want to know is why is it so hard to give us a link to it some people may not of even installed the old version or like me have a firewall blocking it (on Purpose) so now we have to go searching through all the old threads to find the homepage and link for it

You know thats funny you said that considering I JUST released it late last night. So you spent all of what 20-30minutes playing with it? I spent around 80-90 hours coding it HMMM.. Did you take the time to read the website? It has all the info you should need to start!

It will actually allow you to do all that and much more but you have to know how to use it! It WILL load each file and display the controls as they look on your xbox. AND you can click and drag them to any position you want, AND you can click in the lower corner of any control and stretch it to the size you want. If you go to the editing page you CAN edit any name, action, or setting of any control that is in the file.

The user interface is actualy very good for what it does. Some controls are more graphical and you need to see how it looks and where it is positioned. So you use the preview page. If at any time you need to change some actions, or nongraphical settings just switch to the editor page and all settings are displayed.

You could have stated something like: I am trying to do THIS and I can't figure out how, does any one know how to help me with my problem?

I would have been MORE than happy to explain exactly what you need to do to accomplish this. Instead you just complain about something you prob. know little or nothing about!

Do you have ver. 4.0? or did you download the older ver?

I did this so people DO NOT do what the guy above did, just download, try and bash it. This way you will know how to access the information about the program and not come here with blank statements that do not help anyone.

And people Bitch about why is there no skin editor, why is there no documentation on skinning for XBMC, Why is this so hard to skin, why do I have to read all this to set up a skin app on my pc.

Because I spent the time coding and testing for FREE in my spare time to help others out! If I decide that I want the people who downloaded the earlier version to be able to download the latest ver first than Its my program and I can do what I want.

I did submit the link AND the website to Xbox-scene yesterday. Its not posted yet but I am sure it will be. This will be the last time I post a release or submit info to xbox-scene as most people do not build skins for XBMC. Instead the news and updates will be from within the editor! That is the reason I did it the way I did!

ok...I checked the old thread...there was no mention of this newer release/supporting link...could you kindly post the links then?

The link is down for now!

http://jimk.xbox-scene.com/

Here it is back up now.

First off if you cant take critIcism then dont bother making anything.


I tried the last one and like most people the thing never loaded properly. I updated and read very detailed your instructions and again still alot of issues especially with loading backgrounds and images. All I see is alot fo anjelina jolie and morrow wind boxes.

And yes spending about 45 minutes or so is enough for me to know whether or not a graphical program is easy to use. As much time as Ive spent in photoshop , illustrator , and a myriad of other programs I know what easy to use is and cumbersome is.

Whether the issues lies in loading the actual images or reading the xml I have no idea all I know is its not doing it properly. I cant recall exactly the programs issue with texture.xpr is but if it cant handle a texture .xpr file OR mixed media files then its EXTREMELY limited.

I tried loading with textures.xpr still in the media folder to no avail , i tried loading it with JUST my uncompressed images still nothing. The basic text is there but no images.

Its CUMBERSOME .. Oh woah is me for stating the truth. Is not as easy or straight forward as other xml or skin editors ive used. Unfortunately the no1 app IMO for the XBOX has no official skin maker. And anyone including you who could get one fully functional and easy to use would get nothing but praise from me. I have no reaosn to sit here and bash. Re read my post none of it was deragotory.

Could you email me the skin you are trying to load?

all your images that your skin needs has to be in the media folder on your pc. and it must be selected in the options. You need your complete skin folder on your pc with the program running from inside the main folder along with your skin.xml and all your folders like PAL, NTSC, ect..

There is no way to load the textures.xpr file. This is not a collection of the images that were put into it. It is a file of images converted to xbox texture format. they are no longer png images or gif or jpg images. Once they are converted into a xpr file there is no way of loading them on a pc at this time. If someone codes a conversion to convert from the xbox texture file(xpr) to images a pc can use than I will try to include that with the editor.

The program will load actual images that are in your media folder that is selected in the settings. The anjelina jolie image is a image that is used to show where the video overlay will show when a movie is playing. The morrowind and amped icons are a sample of what your thumbnail views will look like when XBMC displays them.

Like I said on the website there is no way to set it up like photoshop or any other app that you can just add what you like and build from new. XBMC is very specific about what it needs for a skin to work and I built the program around that purpose. You just basicly change images, settings, add a button here or there and reposition lists and thumbviews, overlays, labels and thats all. There is no way to create a app to build a skin from scratch.

As for an easy editor, there is NOTHING easy about the skins for XBMC. There are alot of things that are required for a skin to work and giving someone a program that will let someone with little experience change a few items without messing up the entire skin is not easy.

Have you ever used 3d studio max? I have used it for 6+years and it is not user friendly at all, but thats because of what it does is very complicated and there is just no other way. I could have easily threw together a "xml" editor with hypertext highlighting and added some side note to help out editors and called it a skin editor but thats not what I wanted to do.

What is cumbersome about it? The interface, positions of items, the preview screen, or editing page?

How can I send you the files ?
Im guessing email or putfile.com.


Most of my images have replaced standard PM3 skins. I was working on one skin to make it kid freindly and basic so my neice and nephew can use it the other Im still working on. The first one only replaces the "main" pictures. Which is why its frustrating if those basic ones alone cant load.

I figured the thumbnail part but The box on the upper right hand side in the preview page doesnt have any names for any of my images so I dont know if my images simply arent loaded or they just cant preview.
Also can I make thumbnails appear larger ? Thats one of my main goals for my skin.

I say cumbersome because one of the last skins I tried ((unfortunately deleted by accident before I finished)) was an XLOBBY skin and the ease of which you can move things around and change things up was fantastic.

Since it is also xml based Its very frustrating. I do not blame you at all it IS xbmc which seems to be finicky on what it wants.

Anyways my basic goal is simple if you look at the 360 skin its a PM3 skin just overhauled. Id like to do the same but the X, Y and "activate" stuff I know is going to kill me.. I was hoping your prog would help out alot but It doesnt seem to work on my basic one so far.

Could it be a resolution issue or perhaps the xpr being in there ??

I re dled from my xbox , changed my resolution then retored it and my images loaded.

Struck me as odd. Only reason I thought of it is that that was a solution on my old comp when using my ATI card to record tv.

The first thing to do when editing a skin for XBMC is get all the image files for the skin you are going to edit. If you are starting with PMIII than you need to get all the png images the skin uses and place them in the media folder of your skin. I had thought about including a default skin that has images for all the PMIII skin tags but that would mean building an entire skin with ALL custom images and would take many many hours away from working on the program. PMIII images are avail. in the cvs.

There are no names for your images because you never typed in a description for them. The description tag is very important to any skin maker. XBMC does not use the tag at all but if you don't give your controls a uniqe description then it is hard to remember what image is what. The xpr file makes no difference to the editor. So if its there or not it doesn't matter.

If you come accross any errors when loading images be sure and check the No transparencies at the top and the problems will dissapear. This is what caused all the errors with the other versions of this app. It is easy for me to load and render a png image, But I have to load the transparencies from the alpha channel and allow the image to be resized at the same time and recalc all the transparencies.

If you want to rar or zip your skin folder with the images in it and send it to the email from my website above, I will take a look at it.

Constructive critisism is only for good.

But bashing without 1: explaining in detail what does not work and what has been done and what is hard to work with, 2: putting the used files online for the dev to test with (without him having to ask for it), 3: telling the dev to STFU (in essance) if he cant take poor critisism is what?

Piss poor judgement and a bad attiude? Likly...

A "small" thing like 3 or 4 crap posts by users can kill a project when it is on the edge of getting over the top and make all of the xbox community loose something that could be very usefull.

I look for ward to see alot more skins up for XBMC, and this is the app that could make it easy for people to update/fix skins that we all like to use from time to time.

Hey, i want to say something good. I have spent about 5 minutes just playing around with this version, and have to admit, it's running a lot more stable then the last version. The preview window is workikng pretty good now, where the last one didn't show anything but the box, and you had to click on each thing for it to start showing.
This new version is the way i wanted it to work. I'm really liking it so far. One thing i did have a problem with though, so far, is that when i load the weather .xml (Using PM3 skin), the skinner crashes. "Access Violation at address 004994C7 in module "XBMCSkineditor.exe" Read of address 026E3000. Hope that helps.
Other then that, it's takikng off pretty nicely. I personally think it's a pretty usefull program. I skin stuff directly from xml files, and i think (other skinners will agree) this program is very nice, and is a MUCH easier method to create it. If you don't agree, attempt to make one from scratch (directories,blank xml files and all.) This is a very usefull program, even at current version. So far, things are working well for the most part. Thanks again for starting it and sharing it with the scene. Hopefully this will help bring more XBMC skins to the scene. Even though pm3,The Orb,Xbox360 are all i really need myself. LOL

Update- Just tried the 'NO transparent images' as mentioned in instructions for if getting errors, and it fixed the issue with weather. Cool, cool.

Yes the No transparencies is the key. Some png images just have issues being stretched to a certain size. It has to do with the alpha transparencies. So If you disable transparent images it will not have any problems, but the preview isn't as nice.

To find out what image is causing the problem, disable render on loading and then click each control one at a time and the one that causes the error has the image selected. swap back the the editing page and click it again to see the image that it was trying to load.

There is a png loader I can buy that i am sure would remove all the transparent problems but I am not interested in investing money in this app as I already have alot of time invested. Maybe I could try to build a wraper for a c++ pngloader.dll file.

Once again please read the website, its amazing what you may learn.

There will be some that will get this app and find it powerfull and intuitive and seems to work almost flawlessly. Most of them have read the directions and have edited skins before.

Others may find the app completely worthless and will not be able to get anything to work. The main thing is be patient, and ask specific questions, like when I tried this it did this. Instead of I just cant get it to work, what am I doing wrong?

Just incase some of you didn't know the instructions page is perfect for editing specifics of buttons, ids, and any other documented controls from the online manuel. Just click the button for the online manual page you need and you can jump back and forth between the editing page and the instructions page so you don't have to mess with IExplorer and minimize it each time you are done reading up on something.

The xml editor page will eventualy allow you to edit the xml data as you would using notepad but with hypertext highlighting and then reload it into the editor with the changes applied. This will help those that are used to using the text editors.