Xion Community

WARNING:
This is a Beta Build. That means it has fixes and features that are NEW. It is also possible it has bugs that are NEW! If you are looking for stability, please don't expect this build to be perfectly stable. It may have issues. If on the other hand you are happy to try this build out and post any bugs back in this thread, then please do!

Download Installer Version:
r2 Studios Server -> http://www.r2.com.au/downloads/files/beta/qa-xion_v1.0b115.exe
OR
Xion Server -> http://xion.r2.com.au/download/beta/qa-xion_v1.0b115.exe

If you receive errors when running, install the VS2005 Runtimes
Download from Microsoft -> http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=200b2fd9-ae1a-4a14-984d-389c36f85647&displaylang=en

Changelist:

• Added more error messages when skins couldn't be read due to non applied masks as well as incorrect colour modes
  
• Modified loading to reload last skin if new skin couldn't be loaded
  
• Fixed a crash when right clicking on plugins
  
• Fixed an Indicator 'NOT' logic bug that was causing indicator layers marked with 'NOT' to not show themselves correctly - Thanks Alexandra!
  
• Updated the ConfigWindow with some more commands for receiving Text from EditControls
  
• Disabled the About plugin menu item if the plugin is disabled
  
• Fixed the Spectrum analyser not rendering correctly on small visualisation layers - Thanks xonenine!
  
• Fixed the Equalizer not working for Radio Streams - Thanks dolnagad!
  
• Fixed the click and drag of unselected items in the Playlist so that it now correctly selects them - Thanks djinn2!
  
• Changed the visibility of the visualisation layer so that it can be controlled by the skin author
  
• Fixed the Library so that it can be cleanly shutdown when an uninstall is executed. This fixes the freeze in the Uninstaller - Thanks leledumbo and Garrett!
  
• Fixed an issue where clicking on a button, dragging the mouse outside of the window and then back onto the button caused a flickering effect
  
• Fixed the mouse over for a button not hiding when you moved over a transparent part of the skin
  
• Modified the Skin Thumbnail generator so that it uses some default states such as Playing and some default Text, in order to generate skin thumbnails that look better
  
• Added slow blending of colours when changing colours in the DefaultVisualisation plugin
  
• Added support for APPCOMMAND_MEDIA_PLAY and APPCOMMAND_MEDIA_PAUSE instead of just APPCOMMAND_MEDIA_PLAY_PAUSE. This should allow other keyboards to work as well.
  
• Added support for APPCOMMAND_MEDIA_FAST_FORWARD and APPCOMMAND_MEDIA_REWIND so that keyboards with Fast Forward and Rewind should work
  
• Added fix in case default playlist couldn't be found
  
• Added a Compressor to the Equalizer in order to reduce distortion at the extents of the Equalizer. Equalizer now has a much better sound.
  
• Tweaked the Equalizer center frequencies to remove any overlaps
  
• Added support to ap() and pp() to allow you to escape characters such as ( and ). Now you can do things such as " track pp(\() ap(\)) " which will surround the track in ( and )
  
• Modified the Uninstall process to also remove the User settings directory
  
• Added a prompt to the Uninstall process, before removing all Skins, Plugins, Preferences, etc

If you find bugs specifically related to this build, please post them here instead of the Bug reporting forum. Any feedback positive or negative should also go in here, no new threads. This way all feedback, etc related to this build will be in the one place.


ABOUT THIS BUILD:

I've finally had a chance to revisit the Equalizer. You should now notice that there is hardly any distortion when you crank everything up as I'm using a Compressor now.

I've also compiled this build without the extra Debugging that usually goes into a Beta. Therefore there's no longer a crash reporter enabled (So if it crashes you won't be able to send me a report, but I can always send you a new build to reproduce it with), and a couple of other things have been turned off. This will reduce the memory and cpu usage a small amount.

Essentially we can call this build a Release Candidate as its now a preview of the Gold build. Assuming all goes well, Gold/Public release will be build 116!

Let me know if you find any issues! Also if everything is running smoothly then please let me know too!

Any questions or bugs related to this build should be posted here only!

Enjoy!

Cliff

Thanks a lot Cliff!

OK I'm trying to break it in unusual ways, just to see how it's holding up, and in doing so I've just discovered a funny bug. This bug is with the playlist menu buttons:
Click on one of the buttons until the menu pops up, but leave curser over the button. Then, quickly click on another button before the previous button has faded back to it's normal state. The second button will now appear to continuously 'flash' between it's down and normal states. So that's that...

Another little issue with the playlist, the dotted resize guide's size is based on the PSD canvas size. This causes lots of frustration when trying to resize as the dotted line is way bigger than the playlist itself. The default playlist has this in effect for the right and bottom sides. So if you could, please change the resize rectangle to use the snap layer, or perhaps even create a new layname for 'resizerectangle' incase the user's snap isn't cool either.

With that said, I'd also like to remind you of the window snapping issue we talked about involving canvas size

OK another strange bug with the EQ plugin of all things!:
Firstly, move any one of the sliders. Now, open the preset dropdown menu and select any one of them, but once you've clicked one, don't move the cursor yet. When the menu disappears, you will see that the slider you moved before selecting the preset has completely disappeared. Now hover over where the sliderbit should be and it will reappear, click and drag to make the backing lines reappear. This works with every EQ slider. Weird stuff

Since we're still on the EQ subject, I notice the new compressor is active even when all the sliders are set to normal position. Is there any chance you could gradually enable it depending on how much they are increased? Perhaps try a seperate compressor for each frequency too. But in general, the compressor is a great idea man! The distortion made the EQ pretty usable really.

One last small one. This only works when Xion is first launched. So launch Xion and open the playlist. Quite simply, the Search text field is completely black until you roll over it. This only occurs once every launch.

That's it for now. I'll add more when I get some time to play again

Peace, Lance

Was going to edit my last post but I'll keep that for bugs only.

I just wanted to ask about this:

Changed the visibility of the visualisation layer so that it can be controlled by the skin author

How do we do that exactly? If it works how I think it will, then thanks! Lot's of authors will appreciate this.

EDIT:
Another quick question. Any chance you could increase the speed in which the peaks fall on the spectrum vis? They seem too slow as they are.

Peace, Lance

Great job Cliff.
I confirm what Lance said, plus the default EQ value seems loud, like at +6Db. The VU meter bars works fine only when EQ is off, or it should be that way?

The albumart only seems to be changing on skin refresh, in cases of multiple psds.In the case of a single .psd, the switching works as long as the skin is "active" layer.

Lance Wrote:Thanks a lot Cliff!

OK I'm trying to break it in unusual ways, just to see how it's holding up, and in doing so I've just discovered a funny bug. This bug is with the playlist menu buttons:
Click on one of the buttons until the menu pops up, but leave curser over the button. Then, quickly click on another button before the previous button has faded back to it's normal state. The second button will now appear to continuously 'flash' between it's down and normal states. So that's that...

Oh nice find That's due to a recent change, I'll fix for 116

Lance Wrote:Another little issue with the playlist, the dotted resize guide's size is based on the PSD canvas size. This causes lots of frustration when trying to resize as the dotted line is way bigger than the playlist itself. The default playlist has this in effect for the right and bottom sides. So if you could, please change the resize rectangle to use the snap layer, or perhaps even create a new layname for 'resizerectangle' incase the user's snap isn't cool either.

Yes I've been meaning to fix it. No one really mentioned it till now so I thought it was low priority.

Lance Wrote:With that said, I'd also like to remind you of the window snapping issue we talked about involving canvas size

Hmm yes I thought I'd fixed this. I tested it after the fix and it seemed fine but now I see its still broken.

Lance Wrote:OK another strange bug with the EQ plugin of all things!:
Firstly, move any one of the sliders. Now, open the preset dropdown menu and select any one of them, but once you've clicked one, don't move the cursor yet. When the menu disappears, you will see that the slider you moved before selecting the preset has completely disappeared. Now hover over where the sliderbit should be and it will reappear, click and drag to make the backing lines reappear. This works with every EQ slider. Weird stuff

Oh I thought this was just my Virtual Machine environment but I see it happens normally now too. Yay for bugs!

Lance Wrote:Since we're still on the EQ subject, I notice the new compressor is active even when all the sliders are set to normal position. Is there any chance you could gradually enable it depending on how much they are increased? Perhaps try a seperate compressor for each frequency too. But in general, the compressor is a great idea man! The distortion made the EQ pretty usable really.

Ok, seems I need to do some more tweaking on it. The compressor should always be active. The idea is that it clamps at the outer ranges. I'll look into it some more.

Lance Wrote:One last small one. This only works when Xion is first launched. So launch Xion and open the playlist. Quite simply, the Search text field is completely black until you roll over it. This only occurs once every launch.

Ah nice pickup, thanks

Lance Wrote:That's it for now. I'll add more when I get some time to play again

Peace, Lance

Thanks!

Cliff

Lance Wrote:Was going to edit my last post but I'll keep that for bugs only.

I just wanted to ask about this:

Changed the visibility of the visualisation layer so that it can be controlled by the skin author

How do we do that exactly? If it works how I think it will, then thanks! Lot's of authors will appreciate this.

This is referring to the ability to show and hide a layer. It was something Jikaru was asking for. Normally the visibility was controlled by whether you had a visualisation plugin enabled and loaded or not.

Lance Wrote:EDIT:
Another quick question. Any chance you could increase the speed in which the peaks fall on the spectrum vis? They seem too slow as they are.

Peace, Lance

Sure, I'll make the change for 116.

Cliff

Pixel-Z Wrote:Great job Cliff.
I confirm what Lance said, plus the default EQ value seems loud, like at +6Db. The VU meter bars works fine only when EQ is off, or it should be that way?

By +6Db too loud do you mean if you use Flat and turn it On/Off ?

Not sure what you mean about the VU Meter bars? I tried here and they seem to be working fine if I have the EQ on or off. Can you give me any more details?

Cliff

xonenine Wrote:The albumart only seems to be changing on skin refresh, in cases of multiple psds.In the case of a single .psd, the switching works as long as the skin is "active" layer.

I tried this here and it seemed to be changing ok? Could you give me a step by step to reproduce?

Cliff

Hmm yes I thought I'd fixed this. I tested it after the fix and it seemed fine but now I see its still broken.

Ahh man, my bad! I didn't actually test to see if you' fixed it because it wasn't in the list of fixes. So I just tried it now and it's fine! So no worries! Well done! Exclamation mark!

Peace, Lance

Cliff Cawley Wrote:

xonenine Wrote:The albumart only seems to be changing on skin refresh, in cases of multiple psds.In the case of a single .psd, the switching works as long as the skin is "active" layer.

I tried this here and it seemed to be changing ok? Could you give me a step by step to reproduce?

Cliff

This behaviour is the same for me w/ every skin, I guess it could be a Vista issue. When manually choosing tracks, the art refreshes. If a playlist is just selected and left to run, it doesn't change.

I am using embedded art, instead of folders, maybe that is complicating the issue?

Also, I noticed that the visualizations start at full visibility, then it goes faded and blurry, and only seems to be able to draw one visualization layer, instead of the whole stack of 2 or 3 vis layers. (or if they are displaying, they are so faded you can't tell they are different layers/colors) This change in vis display from 114 to 115 will show in skin db2250, which has several vis' w/ multiple layers .

xonenine Wrote:Also, I noticed that the visualizations start at full visibility, then it goes faded and blurry, and only seems to be able to draw one visualization layer, instead of the whole stack of 2 or 3 vis layers. (or if they are displaying, they are so faded you can't tell they are different layers/colors) This change in vis display from 114 to 115 will show in skin db2250, which has several vis' w/ multiple layers .

Are you sure that isn't your vis settings in the config causing the blur? There's an option for motion blur and it makes the new spectrum rather strange. Just double check to see if you've left it enabled. If that's not the case, then I can't reproduce this myself. I downloaded db2250 and all 3 vis work fine for me and don't blur.

Peace, Lance

i tried changing the vis settings, no luck, the colors are almost indistinguishable from the background color here...

Another small suggestion Cliff. Something that's bugged me for some time is when I have the playlist (or other windows) snapped to the main player, and I minimize Xion, all of the snapped windows stay open. I don't mind this when they're not snapped but could you hide all snapped windows on minimize too? Once that is implemented, snapped component based skins will start to become popular with Xion. Yayyy. Of course though, we just need a skinnable EQ to seal the deal

Peace, Lance

Lance Wrote:

xonenine Wrote:Also, I noticed that the visualizations start at full visibility, then it goes faded and blurry, and only seems to be able to draw one visualization layer, instead of the whole stack of 2 or 3 vis layers. (or if they are displaying, they are so faded you can't tell they are different layers/colors) This change in vis display from 114 to 115 will show in skin db2250, which has several vis' w/ multiple layers .

Are you sure that isn't your vis settings in the config causing the blur? There's an option for motion blur and it makes the new spectrum rather strange. Just double check to see if you've left it enabled. If that's not the case, then I can't reproduce this myself. I downloaded db2250 and all 3 vis work fine for me and don't blur.

Peace, Lance

As strange as it sounds, I'm getting the most contrasting vis layers w/ blur and zoomer on, and the least contrast w/ them off...xonenine I shouldn't say it blurs. The vis starts at full contrast, then fades...

this is the most contrast I can achieve...



here's a better picture of the fade, w/ my mini interface...the one on the left stays on about 1 second, then fades to the final result on the right.



here's a link to the mini, if anyone wants to see if this happens on their system...

http://www.geocities.com/downwcarbon/sdc.zip