Windows 2k like Winamp Skin

[Eris Lund]

Sadly, this is not a Modern Skin as I had previously planned (like 1 or 2 years ago maybe), so it's a classic skin for the moment being.

I've just now updated it to be more fitting to WACUP, with all the text and even replacing the old logo with the new one.

The inspiration came to me when I had wondered what Winamp would look like if it was drawn to the OS's theme (the other one's I had seen weren't nearly as good enough and didnt hit the theme correctly), and the only thing I had was my laptop with a broken Windows Vista install and I could only use Linux with Wine.
I began to slowly copy and paste each window part of Wine to the Classic Winamp bitmaps in GIMP, of course improving over time. I also inspired myself a little bit by Winamp 1.x, with the Clutterbar being seperated from the main display.

Now with Windows 10 being out and almost everyone using it, it kinda became outdated rather quickly (I can surely imagine a few people still hanging tight on Windows 7), but I still wanted to share this one.

Tell me what you think below and/or some improvement suggestions

Best experienced by disabling Skinned mouse cursors btw.

[victhor]

Heh, nice idea, there isn't much I can see to improve beyond doing a proper skin... haha just kiddin'. I'm not sure if it's by design or what, but I would like the playback glyphs to be more centered and / or a bit smaller to keep some proportion with the button size.
An extra idea / nice touch would be doing a color theme pack* adding the themes included on the original Personalization window. Like seen here >> https://i.ytimg.com/vi/y1q_nlcCjyA/maxresdefault.jpg (there you can only see one, "Slate").

*In classic skins it demands doing a whole separate skin I'm afraid..

[Eris Lund]

I'm not sure if it's by design or what, but I would like the playback glyphs to be more centered and / or a bit smaller to keep some proportion with the button size.

Haha, I mostly drew over the Baseskin of Winamp 5, I havent really thought about that, might wanna do that

An extra idea / nice touch would be doing a color theme pack* adding the themes included on the original Personalization window. Like seen here >> https://i.ytimg.com/vi/y1q_nlcCjyA/maxresdefault.jpg (there you can only see one, "Slate").

*In classic skins it demands doing a whole separate skin I'm afraid..

I wish I knew how to make Modern Skins from scratch, so it would be even more accurate (and dare I say, 100% ).

Oh well, maybe one day it'll happen.

[Eris Lund]

I went ahead and fixed a few things I had noticed multiple times, but never got around to fixing these as genex.bmp was somewhat confusing, now I did when I read the Skinning Updates.txt inwinamp 2.x' baseskin zip, and now it even looks 1000 times more like Windows Classic! Ah, feels reliving...
I also optimized the font in gen.bmp so it kinda looks better now.
Also I made the playback glyphs somewhat smaller, as Victhor had requested (and admittedly it does look better).
If anyone wants to do a "Modern Skin Port" of it, go ahead, and maybe notify and invite me to bugtest it too ;p

[dro]

If anyone wants to do a "Modern Skin Port" of it, go ahead, and maybe notify and invite me to bugtest it too ;p

You can always cheat by using https://github.com/garrjo/WMC_WCL_Template to make a modern skin version of the classic skin (either making new images or just re-using the bmp files depending on if you use WMC or WCL).

Leveraging that is one of the ideas I've had as a means to help easily make scalable classic skins (e.g. for 4k / hi-res displays) though I'm also still debating making a native scalable classic skin engine (based off my skin manager plug-in preview code) and going that route. Either way, classic -> modern is possible in a method that already exists

-dro

[Eris Lund]

If anyone wants to do a "Modern Skin Port" of it, go ahead, and maybe notify and invite me to bugtest it too ;p

You can always cheat by using https://github.com/garrjo/WMC_WCL_Template to make a modern skin version of the classic skin (either making new images or just re-using the bmp files depending on if you use WMC or WCL).

Leveraging that is one of the ideas I've had as a means to help easily make scalable classic skins (e.g. for 4k / hi-res displays) though I'm also still debating making a native scalable classic skin engine (based off my skin manager plug-in preview code) and going that route. Either way, classic -> modern is possible in a method that already exists

-dro

Looks veeery hacky... I might take a look in this.

[garetjax]

It is not hackey at all; in fact WMC/WCL is as native as creating a skin can be.  We load the standard frames, and etc that are used for generating a modern skin and for the most part everything works like a modern skin would.  With the exception of loading BMP.  And even here the native skin library can load BMP for modern skins; but, no one really does as a result of better image format options (png etc).

[dro]

And even here the native skin library can load BMP for modern skins; but, no one really does as a result of better image format options (png etc)

BMP was the natural choice for classic skins when they were created as that closely matches what Windows GDI likes to work with along with easy means to load BMP.

It could be said that allowing PNG support would have been a nice thing to do (ideally around the 2.9x / 5.0) time scale but I don't think anyone developing at the time really thought about doing it (with so much focus on modern skins by that time, classic was ignored - though a few things did get tweaked in some 5.5x & 5.6x releases to give a bit of parity back to classic skins vs modern skins).

It is now possible to have a classic skin using PNG with WACUP which I know is late but might be handy if anyone is still wanting to make a new classic skin without having to export to BMP first (that's the reasoning why I mainly did it along with it nice to see a full classic skin that's only a few 10's of KB ).

-dro

[dro]

I also need to pull my finger out and sort out a mode in the skin manager that'll allow for quickly converting a classic skin into a WMC/WCL one as I know it's a simple task (copy some files over) but I don't think some will be happy or willing or (to an extent) capable of doing that so a bit of hand holding it probably best

-dro

[weklfj]

Thanks, good job!

[victhor]

I also need to pull my finger out and sort out a mode in the skin manager that'll allow for quickly converting a classic skin into a WMC/WCL one as I know it's a simple task (copy some files over) but I don't think some will be happy or willing or (to an extent) capable of doing that so a bit of hand holding it probably best

-dro

I don't know, sounds like it's a feature more on the side of the skinning people, and those are not the "target" of the plugin, I think. It sounds like it may be an unnecessary "complication", not helping to the overall cluttered Preferences window.
I would suggest putting it into a separate plugin / access, maybe some standalone feature aimed at skinners or grouped along other tools in a "skinners tools" plugin (it would next to.. What other tools may be? Wasabi compilers?)

[dro]

I think we might have gotten the wires crossed on this as the thinking behind that (which is not certain to happen) was more to make it simpler for users rather than skinners and those that want a scalable classic skin without needing someone else to do things for them or don't have the technical skills.

As it could be done as a simple single button / menu action (so not much clutter) but as I've got things going on which make more of the classic skin scalable (at least more parts work with double-size) maybe leveraging the modern skin engine to deal with classic skins isn't the right. So I'm not sure about the whole "skinners tools" plug-in aspect as it wasn't what I'd been thinking about (was purely just a way to resolve non-scaling classic skins).

-dro

[garetjax]

Sorry, bring up old threads; But I find this intriguing.  Scaling classic skins would have been awesome.  Especially, if the aspect rations were maintained...I can imagine a whole range of uses for a plugin that allowed that single click usage.  If it ever comes about...I'd love to hit that up...