Following on from my previous post about Vendetta Online, I’ve spent a large portion of my day working on a new skin for Vendetta Online. I’ve always found the default skin fairly mediocre. While it’s nice, it doesn’t scale overly well to my 1080p monitor. Now, in the modern day, it’s not unusual to have a high-resolution monitor, and to have the radar sprites aliased and upscaled to fit the screen was my equivalent of scraping nails down a blackboard.
So, instead of bitching about it, I thought I would ‘simply’ fix it. Now, I leafed through a couple of other people’s skins, browed through the empty ‘how to make a skin’ wiki page and thought; “It’s not going to be easy, but I’ll give it a try.”. Now, if you’ve ever had any experience re-skinning an application before, you’ll know that it’s never as easy as you think it should be. Vendetta Online is, unfortunately, no exception.
I thought it would have been nice if the skins consisted of an XML file that would allow you to set the text colors and provide solid borders without the need for producing graphics, but I can also see how this is low on the priority scales for the developers. Anyway, with over 100 files to produce my head is already turning around ideas of how to produce a piece of software to make the whole process easier, but for now, here are some screenshots of the skin that I have been working on.
As you can see, there are a few bits that need some extra work. Most importantly, the HUD elements are still plagued by an aliasing problem that was the main reason that I wanted to write this skin. However, this time, it's not the radar, but the central HUD elements. Anyway - I'll find a good compromise, get it all packaged up, and hopefully release it out to the community at some point soon.