Multiscreen buttons - Navigation / Hashcode Problem

by **tswhite70** on Wed Apr 18, 2007 9:57 pm

Hopefully one of the skin gurus can help me out...

I've got a toolbar of buttons across the top of my skin (widescreen - tweaked XLMP). These are individual buttons (not a database), each one has a unique Button_ID assigned to it. I've assigned Navigation to each of the buttons for proper remote control use. The buttons are only on my menu page. Everything works fine, navigation continues to be correct through multiple Xlobby restarts. Now I make each of the buttons multiscreen and assign them to the rest of the screens using the Advanced tab. All hell breaks loose. Navigation gets messed up on all the screens including the original menu screen. It looks like the hashcodes are different in some which of course breaks the navigation and some of the navigation xml tags are gone (although I think this is do to the hashcodes changing).

Has anyone seen anything like this before? Am I doing something inherently wrong by configuring navigation for multiscreen buttons? I even tried to manually add the buttons to each xml file after getting everything set up on the menu page. But after restart and opening the skin editor everything seemed messed up again!

Can someone else check their hashcodes across pages they are using multiscreen buttons on?

Any help would be appreciated, I've burned more than a few hours messing with this without any success. BTW, this is on the last non-expiring version of Xl.

TIA,
tsw

Example movie button XML from menu.xml (ie original page):

Code: Select all: <eventbutton> <eventid>goto:movies</eventid> <imagename>btn_source.png</imagename> <states> <state> <name>default</name> <default>True</default> <imagename>btn_source.png</imagename> <eventid>goto:movies</eventid> </state> <state> <name>selected</name> <imagename>btn_source_active.png</imagename> <eventid>toggle:movies_a</eventid> </state> </states> <location>244,6,155,46</location> <id>MOVIES_BTN</id> <navitem>True</navitem> <multi>True</multi> <hashcode>8845486</hashcode> <text>MOVIES</text> <fontresource>panel</fontresource> <font>BankGothic Lt BT,3.88888888888889%,#FFFFFF,regular</font> <alignment>middle center</alignment> <outline>1</outline> <outlinecolor>#000000</outlinecolor> <backgroundcolor>#000000</backgroundcolor> <backgroundoutlinecolor>#A5A5A5</backgroundoutlinecolor> <backgroundoutlinesize>1</backgroundoutlinesize> <navup>8845486</navup> <navleft>9496437</navleft> <navright>9119546</navright> <keepaspectratio>True</keepaspectratio> </eventbutton>

Example movie button XML from intheaters.xml (after multiscreen):

Code: Select all: <eventbutton> <eventid>goto:movies</eventid> <imagename>btn_source.png</imagename> <states> <state> <name>default</name> <default>True</default> <imagename>btn_source.png</imagename> <eventid>goto:movies</eventid> </state> <state> <name>selected</name> <imagename>btn_source_active.png</imagename> <eventid>toggle:movies_a</eventid> </state> </states> <location>244,6,155,46</location> <id>MOVIES_BTN</id> <navitem>True</navitem> <multi>True</multi> <hashcode>8487366</hashcode> <text>MOVIES</text> <fontresource>panel</fontresource> <font>BankGothic Lt BT,3.88888888888889%,#FFFFFF,regular</font> <alignment>middle center</alignment> <outline>1</outline> <outlinecolor>#000000</outlinecolor> <backgroundcolor>#000000</backgroundcolor> <backgroundoutlinecolor>#A5A5A5</backgroundoutlinecolor> <backgroundoutlinesize>1</backgroundoutlinesize> <navup>8845486</navup> <navleft>9496437</navleft> <navright>9119546</navright> <keepaspectratio>True</keepaspectratio> </eventbutton>

by **Colby** on Thu Apr 19, 2007 2:21 am

Am I doing something inherently wrong by configuring navigation for multiscreen buttons?

So how would buttons know their relative navigation if they are multi-screen? Are you assigning these buttons navigation on the other screens too? If not, what happens if you do?

If this top row of buttons is a common layout on several screens you may consider making them a menu category. You will have better control, and you can still have independent events and show/hide.

by **tswhite70** on Thu Apr 19, 2007 3:47 pm

I guess I was under the assumption that when a button was made multiscreen XL was "replicating" the <eventbutton>...</eventbutton> from one XML to the others. IE From the "Source" page that I was currently editing, it would do this one time and therefore as long as I didn't edit any of the buttons again the hashcodes for each button would be identical across the pages and the navigation hashcodes would be correct. If that was truly the case my navigation would continue to work (I'm only setting navigation on and between the menu buttons themselves) assuming there was not a conflicting button hashcode on one of the screens.

If I try to set navigation on each screen the multiscreen button is on, things go haywire also. It's the hashcodes, they won't stay consistent across the screens.

But from what your saying I guess I can see that navigation setting isn't currently supported with multiscreen buttons. I think that maybe some improvements to the way multiscreen works might help. Multiscreen buttons should only be able to be edited on the "source" page - display characteristics, size, location, events, etc would all be defined only on the source page. On all other pages the only editable characteritics would be "Default" and "Navigation" - if tthese settings were changed on a non-source page it would override whatever setting was passed from the source for those characteristics only.

Does that make sense? Seems logical to me. I know I was getting pretty confused at times when dealing with the multiscreen buttons on different pages in the editor.

I don't think setting them up as a category is going to work because of the layout (size/location of the buttons), and I'm not sure I'd be able to get the toggle states to continue to work as they are.

But I'm kinda stuck right now with the skin. I need proper remote control navigation, the default nav isn't working the way I'd like. I guess I may have to get rid of the multiscreen buttons and just create unique buttons on each page. Maybe I should of done that a while ago, just copying the <eventbutton> definitions from the menu.xml to the others but with multiscreen turned off.

thanks,
tsw

by **rhinoman** on Thu Apr 19, 2007 7:36 pm

I had a similar issue with multiscreen buttons but with buttons randomly disappearing/hiding. I ended up just copy/pasting from the main page the group of buttons I wanted to carry over to the new page.

by **tswhite70** on Fri Apr 20, 2007 6:22 pm

thanks rhinoman - I did just that last night. After turning multiscreen off on all the buttons and resetting their nav on the main page - I copied the whole group using the skin editor to another page. Surprisingly, or maybe not, the nav was messed up again - wrong hashcodes. So I shut Xlobby down and copied the <eventbutton> definitions for the buttons from the main xml file to all the others pages. Started up XL and everything was cool.

I guess multiscreen is maybe cool for those using mouse or touchscreen, but definitely not for remote control - at least not the way I skin :twisted:

tsw