Skins SVN Build Help

Discussion and development of skins for XBMC4XBOX
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Coldly-Indifferent
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Skins SVN Build Help

Post by Coldly-Indifferent »

I downloaded a XBMC4Xbox skins "SuperPack" I found elsewhere which is marked as being 4 years old. It contains twenty-nine skins and ten of those I'd not come across before so was interested in seeing.

However the download must have come from a SVN repository as I soon discovered it contained unbuilt skins and and a (hidden) .svn folder. Maybe there is a good reason but why they were supplied like this I can't guess,

I've only had to deal with skins from such a repository once before and long ago uninstalled the intrusive TortoiseSVN client I'd used for that download. But I eventually remembered enough to realise that even in this 'checkout' form I still had to use the batch build file(s) included to get the skins to build properly so they could be installed. Fine and doing that appears to have worked correctly but.............there's a problem, possibly.

Of the ten skins I am most interested five do not contain any MS-DOS Batch file(s). There is, typically, the expected skin.xml, readme, documentation files along with fonts, region/resolution, media and sometimes a few other folders including the hidden .svn one.

I'm stuck knowing what to do with these. If they have no batch file they can't be built so unless it is some peculiar fault with the download it occured to me that maybe these particular skins did not need to be built and can be used as is. I had noticed whilst the other skins were building that the main task seemed to be converting the images files in the 'media' folder into a single Textures.xpr.

Would I be right in thinking that these particular skins: BLUEBlack, MediaPortalX, T9, Visor and XMBox do not need this XPR because they are skins designed for much earlier versions of XBMC(4Xbox) which did not use this type of graphics file?

That is just a guess based on the inadequate evidence available. There's no indication in the documentation supplied or from my web searches that this is correct.

Whatever the case I'd really like to find out the right way to prepare and use these particular skins so would appreciate any help that can be given here.
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Rocky5
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Re: Skins SVN Build Help

Post by Rocky5 »

You could just copy the build.bat & the exe (can't remember it's name) into the skin folders & use that to build the xpr file.

XBMC will load the images from the media directory, but it will use more ram.
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Coldly-Indifferent
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Re: Skins SVN Build Help

Post by Coldly-Indifferent »

You mean use build files from another skin in the set which do come with them?

Well I did think to do and did try myself that. Maybe it was just because of the one I used but the build command window indicated that there were errors: some files could not be found. It did create a Textures.xpr in "media" but other stuff seemed to be missing.

I assumed this was because the particular batch files I'd used were specific to each skin and therefore couldn't be used if there were files the source batch files weren't set up to include. Or visa-versa.

If you were suggesting that I could use the unbuilt skins as they are and XBMC4Xbox would still be able to use the "media" folder graphics files in their raw form ie. as JPEGs and PNGs I did also try that with one of them. I found that XBMC4Xbox (v3.5.1) did not recognise it as a skin.

One thing I noticed in the build batch file command window which is done at the end of the build is to delete the SVN directories. So I also tried removing the previously hidden (in Windows) .svn folder that all these unbuilt skins stilll include despite having no build file. That didn't make any difference either - the skin was still not recognised.

I was wondering if there is any way with a SVN client like TortoiseSVN I could decompile then re-checkout the skins so that they would generate their own new build batch files? I suspect this is a stupid idea and if the files are missing from the skin its not going re-appear whatever I do. But I thought it worth asking in case that sort of information might be included in the 'hidden' .svn folder.
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Dan Dar3
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Re: Skins SVN Build Help

Post by Dan Dar3 »

.svn folder is created when you "checkout" (download) an SVN project, it is a structured folder where SVN clients keep track of what version the file(s) you have downloaded. It doesn't have anything to do with the skin itself, transfering it to your Xbox is not harmful in any way it will just waste your time (lots of small files in it).

You mentioned TortoiseSVN as being intrussive - you can make it play nicer if you disable icon overlay cache altoghether or set it only to paths where you know you have projects downloaded from SVN servers, see more below:

http://dandar3.blogspot.com/2012/04/tor ... cient.html
http://www.paraesthesia.com/archive/200 ... k-io.aspx/

You can also make the TortoiseSVN context menus to show up in Explorer only when you need it by pressing Shift + Right Click, instead of having them show all the time in any location, look for "Hide menus for unversioned paths" below (Settings > General > Context Menu):
http://tortoisesvn.net/docs/nightly/Tor ... tings.html

~~~

Look at your build bat file, look for "echo off" maybe at the start and change to "echo on" or remove the "@" from in from of commands (e.g. @del ...) to make it show the commands for those error messages, upload the results of it to a service like http://pastebin.com and give us a link to be able to help you further.

To get a better idea, you can also play with the standard skins here (from the Development tab at the top) - you can take them down, look at the structure, look at their build.bat file and run them to see what the produce where. The SVN client should be helpful in showing the newly created files or folders with a question mark instead of a green check (that is if you stop meddling in those .svn folders, which btw where supposed to be hidden, bet you configured your Explorer to show hidden files - http://windows.microsoft.com/en-ie/wind ... =windows-7)
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Re: Skins SVN Build Help

Post by Coldly-Indifferent »

Thanks for all the info and help particularly the stuff about stopping TortoiseSVN invading the context menu. That was indeed what particularly irked me about it.

Yes, the default for Windows is to have certain key files hidden, I've known about that for a long time. Indeed it is probably safer this way but when I eventually became aware that there might be some other hidden folders it concerned me so I temporarily changed Folders > View to show them.

As for the skins without build batch files there is definitely some sort of problem with them. I'll have to take your word that those .svn files, which I've also discovered are found in every sub-folder of the unbuilt skins too, don't or shouldn't cause any problems.

However against my normal practice in dealing with Xbox problems I FTPed one of the skins, MediaPortalX, as is direct to XBMC > skin in a test copy of v3.5.1 runnning as an app. In its Settings > Appearance > Skins trying to launch it was impossible because it was greyed out and acompanied by an error message "Incompatibile........."

That seems to be a standard error for any non-working skin. My previously non-working Basics-101 copy did the same thing until I re-downloaded that from a new source and found it did work with recent skins.

Also another problem occured when I tried to copy the unbuilt MediaPortalX skin using both XBMC4Xbox and UnleashX's file managers into a temporary folder. I was going to try and install it in another much earlier XBMC(4Xbox) version to see if the version/age was the problem. However both file managers flagged up an error message when copying the main skin folder's .svn folder. They both refused to copy it beyond a particular point.

I thought it might be a file name size matter as the SVN extensions add significantly to the names of some folders/files. But surely that shouldn't be happening if the skin was meant to used in this unbuilt form with any version of XBMC(4Xbox).

Isn't this just more good evidence that these skin do need to be built correctly before use and that build batch files are necessary? Why they are missing is relatively unimportant, the fact is they're not there.

I think I've found the SVN repository that the downloader originally used so I'm going to bite the bullet and re-install TortoiseSVN and try getting those skins direct clean and fresh, if the repository still works of course.
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Dan Dar3
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Re: Skins SVN Build Help

Post by Dan Dar3 »

Good stuff. The part with the "incompatible" message or the entry being grayed out, it might have to do with the "version" tag in the skin.xml might need to be a certain version and up - might have more details in the Q:\xbmc.log about that. See for example the skin.xml for one of the skins supported by the latest XBMC4Xbox below: https://svn.exotica.org.uk:8443/xbmc4xb ... e/skin.xml
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Re: Skins SVN Build Help

Post by Coldly-Indifferent »

After reading up more about TortoiseSVN what I did with these skins without the build files is use the Export rather than Checkout option. This strips away the SVN directories so you should get just the working copy of the files. That appeared to go fine but it didn't help get BLUEBlack working.

I then also tried changing the version in the skin.xml as suggested and whilst, after restarting XBMC4Xbox, it did mean the skin was recognised in the main listing it didn't help with getting it to function properly. A front page image loaded but that was all, no text or menus nothing. I tried a couple of the other skins with similar result.

So the problem is they still don't work or to be accurate four out of the five don't work. That is actually the most frustrating thing because the XMBOX skin downloaded from the same repository at the same time and treated in exactly the same way as those other ones now does work perfectly.

It's media folder is full of PNGs and JPGs, rather than just the one Textures.xpr more recent skins all seem to use, but it works. As does the updated copy of the same skin I found elsewhere which does use a Textures.xpr.

So I now have two significantly different copies of the same skin which work fine with XBM4Xbox v3.5.1 but no idea why they both work but the others still don't.

We can now surely rule out the non-working skins being due to any SVN extraction problem or to the absence of a Textures.xpr or not being tagged as a v2.1 skin in the skin.xml. But what's left that I could try?
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Dan Dar3
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Re: Skins SVN Build Help

Post by Dan Dar3 »

Leaving the SVN discussion aside (I would use Checkout rather than Export cause if you delete or modify a file by accident you won't know), look at my post aside - it has links to build.bat that do build the Textures.xpr (if you look carefully it might mention an .exe that builds the texture, navigate the web up and to the location mentioned in the .bat file and you will find it to download) and you can also look at the skin.xml file and increase the version locally before uploading to your Xbox.
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Re: Skins SVN Build Help

Post by Coldly-Indifferent »

I'll certainly try it so thanks for that.

But I'm suspicious now that there may well be things broken in those particular skins in the repository/original download.

I installed XBMC v1.1.0 and v2.01 from 2004 and 2006 respectively.

With v2.01 none of those skins worked either when using Checkout and then Export to strip the SVN directories or Exporting them direct from the repository archive. They were all greyed out in skin listing and flagged as incompatible because v2.0 or higher skins are need. Even when I changed the skin.xml to include <version>2.1</version> and I could get them recognised and they wouldn't load or would only half load the Home Page. Unusable.

With v1.1.0 three out of the five skins weren't even recognised. BLUEBlack loaded a Home Page but there was no way to navigate off it. Only Visor had any real functionality but there were key features that didn't work at all in particular Screen Calibration.

If they won't work as they are with either of two old XBMC versions there must surely be something fundamentally wrong with them.
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