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FM15 Sidebar

Tommo1

By Tommo1,
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Drakestone

Drakestone

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The way they have coded the sidebar this year (hiding all customisation options) means there is no way around this. It will always recolour when you are on a page related to your team. Not good (Its unlikely there will be many good skins this year)

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TomDixon77

TomDixon77

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I'm bumping this in the mostly forlorn hope that someone from SI will come along and explain why they keep trying to (hopefully inadvertently) sabotage skinning with this sort of thing when new UI features are added. It's not a coincidence that the number of skins that have been created has steadily dropped over the years.

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OzO - Graph

OzO - Graph

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I'm bumping this in the mostly forlorn hope that someone from SI will come along and explain why they keep trying to (hopefully inadvertently) sabotage skinning with this sort of thing when new UI features are added. It's not a coincidence that the number of skins that have been created has steadily dropped over the years.

I have nothing to add.

Thanks TomDixon :applause:

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Drakestone

Drakestone

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I agree completely with Tom, this has to be the most disorganised (file structure wise) and uncustomisable skin FM has EVER had. Its making my job difficult as well. But wait! I can make the sidebarz0r smaller and move it to the right of the screeniez!!!!!! ......wow......

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JAndersson

JAndersson

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I'm bumping this in the mostly forlorn hope that someone from SI will come along and explain why they keep trying to (hopefully inadvertently) sabotage skinning with this sort of thing when new UI features are added. It's not a coincidence that the number of skins that have been created has steadily dropped over the years.

We are definitely not sabotaging skinning on purpose. Both me and Ricey come from the community so SI obviously sees the value in the work skinners do.

What generally happens (as with the sidebar) is that the game is very complex behind the scenes and we have to support a lot of different scenarios (more so with every new version). Building something that works well and remains highly customisable is more difficult and time consuming, so it's not always possible to fit in the time we have. Ultimately it will always be more important to have something that works well in it's default state as that is what most people will be experiencing.

That said, I do feel your pain and I agree that we could do a better job with it. I'll raise the issue internally and see what can be done.

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TomDixon77

TomDixon77

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A couple of further questions then:

1. What images are used for the sidebar background? I've looked at pretty much everything that looks like it might be named right, but can't find a thing.

2. As it stands, is the text colour on the sidebar always white? It seems to pick a dark colour for the sidebar, even on teams that you'd expect it to be a light colour (i.e. Real Madrid)

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JAndersson

JAndersson

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A couple of further questions then:

1. What images are used for the sidebar background? I've looked at pretty much everything that looks like it might be named right, but can't find a thing.

2. As it stands, is the text colour on the sidebar always white? It seems to pick a dark colour for the sidebar, even on teams that you'd expect it to be a light colour (i.e. Real Madrid)

1. It doesn't currently use a background image, it just sets a colour on the container itself. This has been logged as a bug today. You might be able to change the appearance of it by putting a container inside it and setting an appearance on that, but I don't think it's possible to make it transparent at the moment.

2. Yeah, the text is always white. The sidebar doesn't use the team titlebar colour as we wanted to have more control over the colours (to avoid the poor contrast which is present for some teams on the titlebar (which would be unacceptable for the main navigation), and also avoid straight up 255,0,0 reds (for example) which some teams have set in the DB. What happens is there is a set of pre-defined 'accent' colours (can be seen in a file called accent_colours.xml) that we map the team colour to based on hue, saturation and lightness.

In the Real Madrid example, the white main colour fails the lightness check, so it moves on to the secondary colour instead and uses that (or rather, the accent colour that the secondary colours values map to). I've got a chart and explanation of the accent colour system that I can post up at some point if there is interest in it, but unfortunately I don't have time at the moment.

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TomDixon77

TomDixon77

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I don't suppose you could give a brief description of how the slices property in things like paper.xml could you? I do like what it looks like it lets us do with things like gradient effects, etc. That weren't always possible before, because of how the images had to be broken down.

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michaeltmurrayuk

michaeltmurrayuk

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This is guess work as I don't have access to the pre-release Beta, though I have downloaded Drakestones skin and had a look through it's files.

Looking at files from Drakestone's skin it looks like the colour of skin graphics this year are controlled by values set in the settings xml file, so there is a good chance if you cannot find the images that control the sidebar the colour is determined by a setting from the settings.xml file (or as it doesn't look to be a skin specific colour there's a good chance the setting is hidden in one of the colour files located in either the general settings folder or one of the colour files for the widget parent skins , the files are normally commentted so hopefully it has an obvious name, otherwise use an image edit program to get the RGB values of the black siderbar and look for an entry with close to those colours, once you have found the line copy it over to the setting file for your skin and edit it. Hopefully it's not hardcoded or assigned to a random colour like that old training bar was :()

Also judging from the files from Drakestone's skin it looks like the sidebar is controlled by these lines in the 'client object browser.xml' file:

<container>

<layout class="arrange_horizontal_attachment" alignment="left, extend" gap="0" offset="0" />

<layout class="stick_to_sides_attachment" alignment="vertical" inset="0" layout_children="true" />

<widget class="sidebar_menu_table" id="side" width="160">

<animation class="translate_animation" start_value="-0.1, 0" end_value="0, 0" duration="0.4" end_mode="hold_end" tween="ease_out" coord_mode="relative_to_screen" />

<record id="object_property">

<integer id="get_property" value="objt" />

<integer id="set_property" value="cotO" />

</record>

<attachment class="test_global_attachment" get_property="MnuS" mode="1" value="true" set_property="FoHi" skip_if_null="true"/>

</widget>

From that code it looks like there should be a panels file called sidebar menu table somewhere (I'd pressume in the panels.fmf file as it's not with Drakestones skin - if someone finds it and posts it up I can have a look at it) that should control the layout of the sidebar content, which should hopefully have some editable values for the fonts or icons. I also presume that width value determines how wide the sidebar appears, though there doesn't seem to be any code in the file that resizes the sidebar with resolution (I'm guessing he's changed/deleted something to stop it resizing?)

Whilst the object property code looks like the code used to recolour the titlebar, so I'd expect tweaking the ID values might alter the recolouring, whilst removing it may stop it being recoloured atall.

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TomDixon77

TomDixon77

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That was where I got to, then ran headlong into this:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>

<panel>
 <integer id="width_threshold" value="1164"/>
 <integer id="width_with_labels" value="180"/>
 <integer id="width_without_labels" value="50"/>

 <layout class="stick_to_sides_attachment" alignment="all" inset="0" layout_children="true" />

 <!--club/nation selector-->
 <container class="tabbed_container" id="tabc" changed_event="Tesc" contents_kind="container" group_kind="container" hide_selector_if_one_or_fewer_items="true">

   <!--club table-->
   <widget class="table" id="club" mode="select_rows,fill_rows,hide_headings,dont_allow_click_unselect_single" auto_size_rows="true" fixed_size_rows="false">
     <list id="column_display_properties">
       <record width="-1" column_heading="Icon">
         <record id="column_properties"/>
       </record>
       <record width="-3" minimum_width="100" column_heading="Name">
         <record id="column_properties" alignment="left,centre_y" colour="match text" size="10.1"/>
       </record>
     </list>
   </widget>

   <!--nation table-->
   <widget class="table" id="nati" mode="select_rows,fill_rows,hide_headings,dont_allow_click_unselect_single" auto_size_rows="true" fixed_size_rows="false">
     <list id="column_display_properties">
       <record width="-1" column_heading="Icon">
         <record id="column_properties"/>
       </record>
       <record width="-3" minimum_width="100" column_heading="Name">
         <record id="column_properties" alignment="left,centre_y" colour="match text" size="10.1"/>
       </record>
     </list>
   </widget>
 </container>

 <!--unemployed table-->
 <widget class="table" id="unem" mode="select_rows,fill_rows,hide_headings,dont_allow_click_unselect_single" auto_size_rows="true" fixed_size_rows="false">
   <list id="column_display_properties">
     <record width="-1" column_heading="Icon">
       <record id="column_properties"/>
     </record>
     <record width="-3" minimum_width="100" column_heading="Name">
       <record id="column_properties" alignment="left,centre_y" colour="match text" size="10.1"/>
     </record>
   </list>
 </widget>
</panel>

Which is where our grumbling begins.

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michaeltmurrayuk

michaeltmurrayuk

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Looks like these lines:

<record id="column_properties" alignment="left,centre_y" colour="match text" size="10.1"/>

Should allow you to change the text colour and size (unless it's like certain parts of FM14 that are stuck using the match text colour no matter what you do), it might be possible to tweak and insert the object property code within the widget to get the text to recolour (not sure if there are any examples of the object property code being inserted into table code elsewhere to borrow, it also involves finding the id to set the secondary colour rather than primary colour)

Graphics wise it looks like it just uses the generic table graphics (or possibly a tabbed graphic?) as there doesn't seem to be any custom location set, I don't know if you have extracted any of the graphics and had a look through to see if there is a sidebar folder but I'd guess that would be too easy :) Also have a look at the classes folder as I've sometimes found in previous versions that the files there can help narrow down the location of the actual graphic.

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TomDixon77

TomDixon77

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1. It doesn't currently use a background image, it just sets a colour on the container itself. This has been logged as a bug today. You might be able to change the appearance of it by putting a container inside it and setting an appearance on that, but I don't think it's possible to make it transparent at the moment.

2. Yeah, the text is always white. The sidebar doesn't use the team titlebar colour as we wanted to have more control over the colours (to avoid the poor contrast which is present for some teams on the titlebar (which would be unacceptable for the main navigation), and also avoid straight up 255,0,0 reds (for example) which some teams have set in the DB. What happens is there is a set of pre-defined 'accent' colours (can be seen in a file called accent_colours.xml) that we map the team colour to based on hue, saturation and lightness.

In the Real Madrid example, the white main colour fails the lightness check, so it moves on to the secondary colour instead and uses that (or rather, the accent colour that the secondary colours values map to). I've got a chart and explanation of the accent colour system that I can post up at some point if there is interest in it, but unfortunately I don't have time at the moment.

Would I be right in assuming that the dividers that appear over the top of my masking image in my screenshot are similarly unmodifiable? Or are they actually images I can change?

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JAndersson

JAndersson

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Would I be right in assuming that the dividers that appear over the top of my masking image in my screenshot are similarly unmodifiable? Or are they actually images I can change?

They are unmodifiable in the Beta, but it has changed since then. In the final version of the game they will simply use a normal divider picture (with no background colour set in code).

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JAndersson

JAndersson

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I don't suppose you could give a brief description of how the slices property in things like paper.xml could you? I do like what it looks like it lets us do with things like gradient effects, etc. That weren't always possible before, because of how the images had to be broken down.

We've changed how images are sliced to make it easier to export assets, but in terms of gradients the end result will be the same I'm afraid.

Instead of exporting 9 slices for a graphic, you now simply export a single graphic and define the slice points in the the xml.

<!-- image slices determine the points at which the image will be sliced to enable scaling -->

<!-- the image will only slice in the directions slicing values are provided for-->

<record id="image_slices" left="8" right="8" top="8" bottom="8"/>

In the end this works exactly the same as slicing things in Photoshop worked previously, so if you want a gradient you'll need a slice that's big enough to fit the entire gradient or it will stretch. It just allows quicker changes as we don't have to deal with Photoshops fiddly slicing tools.

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TomDixon77

TomDixon77

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We've changed how images are sliced to make it easier to export assets, but in terms of gradients the end result will be the same I'm afraid.

Instead of exporting 9 slices for a graphic, you now simply export a single graphic and define the slice points in the the xml.

<!-- image slices determine the points at which the image will be sliced to enable scaling -->

<!-- the image will only slice in the directions slicing values are provided for-->

<record id="image_slices" left="8" right="8" top="8" bottom="8"/>

In the end this works exactly the same as slicing things in Photoshop worked previously, so if you want a gradient you'll need a slice that's big enough to fit the entire gradient or it will stretch. It just allows quicker changes as we don't have to deal with Photoshops fiddly slicing tools.

Ah. It's still better than having to create eight billion bits of images for buttons, mind.

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TomDixon77

TomDixon77

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Are the values in accent colours.xml used anywhere other than the sidebar? Could we in theory change every value to that of the main sidebar colour and therefore give the illusion of it not re-colouring?

Pretty hacky way I know.

Just tried it, no. Bugger.

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Drakestone

Drakestone

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I'd still be more interested in finding the widget id's for all the pages called up by the sidebar tables so that I can go back to using a menubar style rather than sidebar. It allows far more flexibility. So while I like Toms idea (very much so, kudos for changing the alpha, great idea) and that might be useful in being able to add your own background image for the sidebar (possibly within client object browser.xml) I still think we had a bit more freedom using the older method of calling the links in question.

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