button specific <HIGHLIGHTING> Tag not working?

marcotronic wrote on 6/9/2004, 12:45 PM

Hi everyone,

I just wanted to add a button-specific <HIGHLIGHTING> Information for a theme in the xm file (according to the XML Theme Specification V 2.0.001, there is an example xml file showing the same thing that I want to do...)

e.g.

<HIGHLIGHTING>
<STYLE>CUSTOM</style>
<MASK>mypic_mask.png</MASK>
<MASK-MAPPING>INTENSITY</MASK-MAPPING>
</HIGHLIGHTING>

but the addition I made had no effect on the theme atferwards. I made different attempts but all failed. The information just don´t show up in the property inspector for the "button properties / highlight".

The default highlighting tag for the whole menu seems to work but the button specific tag just seems to be ignored...

Has anybody created a working button-specific highlighting information in a theme? Several other changes I made worked fine but this thing is annoying...

Thanx for any information in advance!

marco

Comments

kameronj wrote on 6/9/2004, 1:38 PM

Nope.

SONYBMO wrote on 6/10/2004, 6:57 AM

You need to be careful because there are two <HIGHLIGHTING> blocks in the XML file. One for the global highlighting information (specifying selected and activated colors). For instance:

<HIGHLIGHTING>
<STYLE>IMAGE</STYLE>
<COLOR>128, 0, 64, 57</COLOR>

<SELECTED-COLORS>
<COLOR1>128, 0, 64, 57</COLOR1>
<COLOR2>128, 0, 64, 38</COLOR2>
<COLOR3>128, 0, 64, 19</COLOR3>
<COLOR4>128, 0, 64, 0</COLOR4>
</SELECTED-COLORS>

<ACTIVATED-COLORS>
<COLOR1>128, 0, 64, 114</COLOR1>
<COLOR2>128, 0, 64, 76</COLOR2>
<COLOR3>128, 0, 64, 38</COLOR3>
<COLOR4>128, 0, 64, 0</COLOR4>
</ACTIVATED-COLORS>
</HIGHLIGHTING>

Note this a child under the <MENU> node. We don't have control over the global "Background Media Highlight mask" in this version of the themes.

However, there is also button-specific highlighting, which is a child of the <GRAPHIC> node. This is the one you want to use to set custom highlights for buttons.

Under <GRAPHICS-LIST>

<GRAPHIC>
<TYPE>Menu</TYPE>
<NAME>Standard Button</NAME>
<FACE>Frame3.png</FACE>
<MASK>Frame3-Mask.png</MASK>
<HIGHLIGHTING>
<STYLE>CUSTOM</STYLE>
<MASK>Frame3-Highlight.png</MASK>
<MASK-MAPPING>TRANSPARENCY</MASK-MAPPING>
</HIGHLIGHTING>
</GRAPHIC>

Hope this helps.

Express wrote on 6/10/2004, 12:59 PM

Yes, I have.
I have created button specific highlighting for many buttons.

I have Pinnacle Studio - and I have created the mask for all of the ones that i wanted - just made a B&W of the original graphic.

Then, using Brian Barnes' DVDA Theme editor, associated the mask with the button - works great.
Last I checked, the theme editor was not fully DVDA2 compliant - but it may be now.

I really don't make a lot of new theme's, I just add components to theme's that I already have - giving me a rather large selection of buttons and backgrounds (static and moving) that I can pick and choose from at build time.
(you can add as many buttons or backgrounds as you want, to each theme, and they show up as components in DVDA)

Chris

marcotronic wrote on 6/10/2004, 1:10 PM

Hi,

thanks a lot, but I did exactly that and it didn´t work. That was what I meant by "button specific highlighting". I put in my <HIGHLIGHTING> Tag as a child of the <GRAPHIC> node in the <GRAPHICS-LIST> as given in the theme specification.

You can download my test-theme here:

http://www.bestpixels.de/testfiles/test20.thm

The button specific highlight behavior for the menu standard button should be "custom" with "intensity"-style. But the property inspector in DVDArchitect always shows "rectangle" as style. I have to switch it to "custom" manually.

Any idea what the problem is? Can you show me a single case where the button specific highlighting tag in the xml works? None the standard themes have this tag...

Thank you again for your help in advance.

Marco

marcotronic wrote on 6/10/2004, 1:17 PM

Hi Chris,

I suppose you didn´t use the highlighting tag I was talking about then, did you? I guess you did something different. I´m almost sure that this tag doesn´t work. Please see my posting above where I posted a download-url for a testtheme I just created.

I guess you used the <FACE-ALPHA> tag as used in the standard "animated 1" theme...?

Thanx,
Marco

Express wrote on 6/10/2004, 2:40 PM

I do a bit of XML for a living - but I have yet to even bother with much of the XML of the theme's.

When used in Brian's editor, it works - I've done it with dozens of buttons - with odd shapes that require specific highlight shapes to work right.
I have specific highlight masks on more than 80 buttons that are not part of SONY's distribution.

I can't tell you what tag he used for the highlight - whatever he is doing, works.
There is a bug in the editor that will not allow you to add the same mask more than once per theme (which is valid in DVDA2, not sure about DVDA1) - so I have copy pasted that information into XML when I need the mask to apply to more than one (for instance, the Pinnacle 'balloon buttons' come in four colors - but one mask works for all four).

Chris

SONYBMO wrote on 6/14/2004, 10:16 AM

Hmm. That's quite odd, I cannot reproduce your problem at all with your test theme. It works exactly as expected for me (that is, Style is set to Custom and Mask is set to Test20: screenthru_highlight.png)

Anyone else have this problem?

bStro wrote on 6/14/2004, 10:41 AM

When I load it, it works just as he says -- Mask is set to Test20: screenthru_highlight.png, but Style is set to Rectangle. Mask mapping is set to transparency.

Rob

bStro wrote on 6/14/2004, 11:13 AM

Okay, the Custom style works in themes, but it's apparently kinda wonky.

What I did:

1. Copied the default theme to a new theme.
2. Changed SHOWIMAGE to false so that I only have to deal with the Highlighting issue, not with frames or masks or any of that junk. ;-)
3. Added a HIGHLIGHTING section witinin the first GRAPHIC item.
4. Inserted a STYLE tag and set it to Custom -- within that same GRAPHIC item.
5. Took out all references to button graphics for that GRAPHIC item.

I didn't add any other new entries to the GRAPHIC item. No mask, no map setting, no frame, nothing. Not that I'm saying these would break it, just that I wanted to start with the bare minimum to be sure that the tags nor my graphics would cause a problem.

At any rate, I zipped up these slightly adjusted XML file along with all the original graphics, ranamed it with a THM extension and copied it to my themes directory. Loaded it up in DVDA and added a button to my menu. The Style for that button is indeed set to custom.

If I take the same file and change SHOWIMAGE to true and put the name of an existing graphic in for FACE, Style reverts back to Rectangle when I load the theme in DVDA.

Curious. There's got to be a correct way to get this to work right, but I'm not figuring it out.

Rob

marcotronic wrote on 6/15/2004, 10:42 AM

Hi,

that´s really crazy. Which OS are you using? I use W2K (Service Pack 4). I also have a problem previewing via firewire in dvda. Before W2K I used Windows XP and the firewire preview in dvda worked on the same computer. Maybe it´s the same phenomenon with the themes?

thanks,
marco

bStro wrote on 6/15/2004, 10:55 AM

I did the above on a Windows 2000 SP5 machine. My machine at home has XP, but I haven't tried this test there. (Actually, I did try a similar experiment there, but the theme wouldn't work at all. It was a quick test, though, so I may have done something wrong that time.)

Rob

marcotronic wrote on 6/15/2004, 2:52 PM

Hi everybody,

I´ve just tested my theme on a dvda installation with Windows XP and it works! That´s very strange, isn´t it?!

Thanks to all for your help so far. Maybe you guys at Sony could have a look on it. It´s really strange that certain xml tags in a theme behave differently on different operating systems.

Thanks in advance for fixing this bug ;-)

Marco

cibi wrote on 7/1/2004, 8:50 AM

I have XP and your theme doesn't work well >>
I have the custom highlight applied on the item-button but the highlight for the interface buttons (next, up, ...) are not the "block" highlight you specified in the <HIGHLIGHTING>

I have the same pb... in fact the highlight style for the interface buttons is set to custom.
and when I try to put a <mask> for these interface buttons, it doesn't work, the Mask is always set to "None"...

I think it's a bug...

vb1966 wrote on 8/3/2004, 1:07 AM

I can report that I have reproduced the same bug as reported by cibi, when I try to a put a <Mask> for the navigation buttons, the Mask always is set to "None".

It is a shame that themes are not being properly implemented in DVDA. Also it seems to me that many features cannot be controlled by themes at all, for instance you cannot enforce a menu button to be animated, whereas you can do this manually from the DVDA interface. Am I missing something?