Skinning

Objectives

• Enable internal designers to more easily customize the look of Second Life
• Enable external developers and residents to save customizations and prepare skin "packages"

Links

• User Interface Roadmap

Task Descriptions

XUI Default Templates

• Objective: Make the XUI files less verbose and more readable
• Create 'templates.xml' file with default attributes for each widget type
  • Other templates for common attribute sets can also be declared here
  • Widgets can declare a tempate (default to the default one for that type)
• Remove all default values from the code (code cleanup)
• Create a tool to process all existing .xui files and write out only the non default values
  • Clean up the XML output at the same time

UI Texture Cache

• Objective: Make it easier to add and modify UI art
• Separate pre-cached images with asset ids from UI images
• Rename UI Images to use file names not asset ids

Remove hard coded art and colors from UI

• Objective: Remove any UI art from the code
• Remove programmatic art with attributes, e.g. volume sliders
• Remove any backgrounds from icons, etc (use alpha)
• Ensure that all images can be cropped and scaled
• Allow specification of fixed size borders (i.e. so that button graphics with narrow boarders scale correctly)
• Enable additional attributes to widgets for colors, etc

Facilitate UI customization

• Objective: Make it easier to see the effects of XUI edits
• Enable reloading of all floaters including the menus and overlay bar
• Ensure all floaters can handle missing UI elements and will behave reasonably or refuse to open with an appropriate message

Facilitate customization of menus and overlay bar

• Objective: enable menus and overlay bar to be more easily customized
• Create a global floater/panel map and have floaters/panels to specify their type (e.g. "floater_inventory" -> LLFloaterInventory) in XML
• Allow buttons to open floaters by name
  • Include support for opening a specific tab
  • Differentiate between toggling state of singletons, showing/focusing, and opening new instances
• Allow menus to be expanded/collapsed for simple/advanced usage
• Specify layout of overlay bar and menu bar in "viewer.xml"
  • Allow multiple "overlay bars" to be added so that side bars or corner panels with buttons can be added

Improve Layout Language

• Objective: make it easier to change the XUI layout data
• Choose a standard model for the layout language (e.g. CSS? qt-like?)
• Allow elements to be grouped for layout purposes
• Auto layout elements when no layout information is provided

Enable Packaging and Resident customizations

JIRA: https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/VWR-1875

• Objective: enable external developers and residents to preserve changes across updates and distribute custom UI layouts
• Allow residents to save changes to a user local directory (i.e. Documents and Settings\User\Application Data\SecondLife\skins)
• Allow residents to package changes and easily distribute them for easy installation by other users
  • Define location to search for installed skin packages
  • Include the ability to change skins and restore the original skin

Specific Requests

• Make iconic panels (i.e.. build tools) generally available
  • Combination of fully iconic buttons and the ability for a button to open a specific tab in a floater