Custom interface icons?

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cde
Posts: 46
Joined: Thu Jul 06, 2006 9:48 am

Custom interface icons?

Post by cde »

I was working through some issues with Broken Sword 2 and it struck me that the exit icon is a Windows logo - nothing unusual there, but it got me thinking.

Since some people are ambitious enough to want to create custom monster.sou files for MI 1 & 2, and restore audio for BASS, and encoding the Broken Sword videos to avoid closed format problems, would it be possible to create your own icons for some (or all) interface elements?

I don't mean re-drawing the "dusty warm hamster" etc, I just mean a geek-friendly tab in SVM's "Edit game" setup for relevant games, so you could choose a different "exit" icon (chunky 256-col version of Ubuntu logo, penguin, OSX logo, the word "exit"...).

The only logical reason for this could be that most kids today (and new users), who may love these games, might not associate the old Windows logo with computers at all, let alone read it as "quit".

Persumably when reading resources for the interface it would be possible to redirect SVM to /icons/exit.bmp (or whatever)? If the whole interface is a single object with defined "hotspots" this could still work, by just replacing part of it.

I might be way off here, and I doubt it would be popular, but almost a decade into skinning mp3 players and web browsers (for no sensible reason) it might be a feature for the future. I doubt I'd even use it, since I am mostly a purist about this stuff, but you never know...
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Dark-Star
Posts: 150
Joined: Sun Oct 30, 2005 9:36 pm
Location: Reutlingen, GERMANY

Post by Dark-Star »

I don't quite get where the problem is here. Okay, I admit I don't own any ScummVM-supperted games which do have a "exit-icon" (certainly all the SCUMM based games I have don't have exit-icons). But what's so difficult about telling your kids "if you want to end playing, just click on the little window-icon over there..."

I always quit ScummVM by pressing Alt-F4 (or the little cross in the upper richt corner of the window, when I'm not running fullscreen).
Certainly, any user who knows how to use Windows knows what the little cross in the title bar does. Even kids should know that.

Oh, and you have to tell them to use F5 anyway, otherwise they can't save their game (still talking about SCUMM games here, other engines may vary). And there's a button labelled "Quit" in this menu, too.

And if you're talking about Unix here I think all of this still holds true, i.e. every window manager I know has a "close" button which can be used to quit ScummVM.

I don't like all those "skinnable" programs, and I'd certainly hate to see ScummVM become one of them
clem
Posts: 2159
Joined: Mon Oct 31, 2005 11:14 am

Post by clem »

Dark-Star wrote:Okay, I admit I don't own any ScummVM-supperted games which do have a "exit-icon"
try BASS, it has C:\DOS as an exit button and images of a 3,5" floppy as save and load buttons (and "loading" mouse pointer)

I'm happy with the game as is though ;)
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