New Steam updates!

[dj6ross]

Dude if you release that right now, ill have your babies.

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quote of the day :D :p

[Nocstar]

Cowwithoutbrain you know im pregnant now right?

[Ryan Versaw]

I am attempting to attach it to this post, we shall see how this goes. I have attached a readme in the zip, so you may wish to take a look at that.

Keep in mind that this was mainly for the mini games list of steam, so I may not have noticed if something else doesn't quite look right due to my changes. Let me know if you need anything, and I hope you enjoy it.

MiniSkin.zip

[Nocstar]

Lol it worked thanks man, It looks fine let me take a screeny!

[Crazysah]

It is much better than the previous version! Good job Valve and Steam!

[Ryan Versaw]

Cowwithoutbrain you know im pregnant now right?

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let me know how well it works on your end before you get too excited :)

[jimbo11883]

cow, you couldn't of at least made it so that it didn't look like dark puke? lol j/k good job buddy! :)

[Nocstar]

heres a screeny!

*morning sickness*

[Ryan Versaw]

I may have been willing to try and change the colors, as it is easy for most of the interface, but many of the corners annoy me as I would have to alter the actual .tga files to make them fit in. Plus, I don't know if I am creative enough to come up with a better looking color scheme :)

Thanks though!

[jimbo11883]

I'm gonna make a Watercolor skin for myself.

[jimbo11883]

Couldn't edit my last post...

I'm slowly learning the Steam UI skin format. I am working on a watercolor skin called "Professional". Here's my progress so far...

[Stianu89]

How can i edit the skin?

[Bili_The_Axe]

You can't do much with it :(

An old skin I made

A new skin (much harder to work with)

No personality

[Ryan Versaw]

You can't do much with it :(

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What would you like to do with it? I would be interested in hearing what ideas you had, just so I could take a look at the code some more, its been awhile.

[Bili_The_Axe]

For one: add images like the old one. The new format does not let you do much other than change colors.

Any image you add is installed on different fronts, like games, server, etc, so they get distoted in one or more and look terrible.

And now instead of changing a couple of images you have to change like 150 tga files. I did one skin for me but it was way to much work. I will bet you will not see many skins until they fix this. There were tons of skins for the old steam.

Some of my old skins

[Slimy]

i've hated steam since day 1. why the hell do I need to be connected to the internet to play half-life 2. It's freaking single player! Steam is also really damn slow, i just want to launch a game but steam always has to launch and log me in, etc. etc.

new interface, so what? i'd rather it was a ****tier interface and 5x faster :/

[Code.Red]

I made a concept a while back (in my signature) and I had a shot at making it, and man, it is a real pain. They need an easier way to edit skins, or at least some official documentation. :/

[Ryan Versaw]

I made a concept a while back (in my signature) and I had a shot at making it, and man, it is a real pain. They need an easier way to edit skins, or at least some official documentation.  :/

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Did you happen to see the skin I made for it awhile back? This is for the new steam interface of course.

I have never really skinned anything before, but I have decided to screw around with steam. Opinions on this?

It is fully-functional, including the small arrow to bring back the full mode

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It actually looks similar to what you created, though my title bar is too large. I am unsure if I can alter that, but I think I will go take a look.

[Ryan Versaw]

For one: add images like the old one.  The new format does not let you do much other than change colors.

Any image you add is installed on different fronts, like games, server, etc, so they get distoted in one or more and look terrible. 

And now instead of changing a couple of images you have to change like 150 tga files.  I did one skin for me but it was way to much work.  I will bet you will not see many skins until they fix this.  There were tons of skins for the old steam.

Some of my old skins

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I have never messed with skinning in the past, so I don't know what it was like with the old interface. Because of this, I don't know how difficult it was to skin the old steam. I do know that you can add pictures and the like to the new interface, and it is likely that you can even do everything with the new interface that you could do to the old one.

The number of images all depends on what you want steam to look like. If you don't need shadows in you skin then you can easily eliminate a large number of images.

I started trying to see how I could make my previous skin smaller, as well as changing a thing or two that a friend requested. The main thing that is bothering me at this point is that I can't manage to shrink the width of it any smaller. I also would like if the "collapsers" were inline with each of the headers, though that is minor.

At this point I am feeling quite a bit more comfortable with how their interface code works, and it seems to be quite simple to add buttons, links, labels, images, and whatever else. Something that can be helpful to find out what each part of the interface is named, is to use the so-called "VGUI Build Mode Editor". Though you can use this editor to alter what your open steam windows look like, it will not save. You can access this interface by pressing Ctrl+Alt+B.

Heres a screen of the skin I have been playing with:

I don't really care about the larger portion of the interface, so it does not look as good as the mini games list at this point.

[random_n]

cowwithoutbrain - how were you able to decapitalize word "STEAM" in the main title bar? It's something I was hoping to add to my skins before I released them, but couldn't figure out how!

BTW: If you are still having trouble getting the interface elements to be a little smaller in size, feel free to have a look at how I've done it (Link) or some of the other implementations (Link). :)

[Subfusion]

It's been quite a while since I havne't played CS, but the last month I bought myself a copy through Steam. I haven't seen how the old versions of Steam look, but I do like the interface. Compared to Counter-Strike 1.3 - 1.5 (Which is what I used to play before) there have been major improvements.

[Ryan Versaw]

cowwithoutbrain - how were you able to decapitalize word "STEAM" in the main title bar? It's something I was hoping to add to my skins before I released them, but couldn't figure out how!

BTW: If you are still having trouble getting the interface elements to be a little smaller in size, feel free to have a look at how I've done it (Link) or some of the other implementations (Link). :)

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Well, that is actually a pretty quick and simple fix, when you know what to look for. If you take a look in the steamrootdialog_small.res file, it will be listed on or around line 18. It is the "title" within "SteamRootDialog". It was originally set to "#Steam_Root_Title", and I changed it to "Steam". This does mean that the account name is no longer shown in the title bar though. There may be a shortcut to displaying only the account name, so that you can still list it there, but I haven't looked around for one. Also- for some reason when you first load up steam, it will still have the default title, with account name and "STEAM". This might be set in a different file, but again, I have not looked for it.

I took a look at your skin, and yours is just as wide as mine is. I made my text smaller, so it would appear that mine might be a small fraction smaller than yours for the height, but you removed a few of the extra boxes around the games and such, so they are likely near the same size.

If you, or anyone else, would like to take a look at the latest version of my skin that I had shown a screenshot from, I will go ahead and attach it to this post.

[edit] In case people didn't notice from my earlier post, I haven't put any work into the rest of the interface, only the mini games list.

[random_n]

Hmm... I tried that (both a long time ago, and again just now), and I still can't get that to work with the title changing. Even with the cheesy Ctrl+Shift+Alt+B editor, it refuses to make the change permanent to the main public Steam\cached directory, let alone the skin-specific directory (its excuse is a read-only file, but it's probably trying to save right into the winui.gcf file). I have no problems changing most aspects of all the other dialogs - including titles - but I don't even see the non-caps title when I use your MiniSkin. :(

I suspect it's related to the reason that I can't change the minimum width of the games and server browsers. Seeing as how it's easy to change such things with the lesser dialogs, but nothing happens when using the same methods on the more important dialogs, I think it's as Valve phrased it in their steamscheme resource file; "doesn't work, wah"... :pinch:

[Ryan Versaw]

I wasn't too clear on what I meant... When you first load up my skin with the mini games list, yeah, it will still show the normal "STEAM - [account name]". If you then switch it to full mode, and back to the mini mode, it should switch to saying only "Steam".

With the ctrl+alt+B editor (you don't actually need shift, though I originally read it with shift as well), as you said, you can't make any changes. I would guess that you may be right about it trying to save it in the GCF file. I do find that dialog quite useful to find the names of items, and that sort of thing though.

[edit] I just looked around for where the title is originally set, and it does appear we can't change what it initially says. I found references to #Steam_Root_Title within the SteamUI.dll, so I would guess that is where it is set when the mini games list first starts up.

Edited November 21, 2005 by cowwithoutbrain