Has anyone sucessfully made an awesome layout with gameslist over snap?

[harveybirdman]

I'm almost giving up here, not being able to have true transparency is probably going to kill this idea, but I'm just wondering if anyone has ever done this type of layout with Mala and made it look righteous?  

Basically the Game list would be on top of the snap.  The inherent problems are A) the name of the games not showing up well and B) if you highlight the selected games with a background color to make them pop it covers ups the main action of the snap.  I'm thinking I could do an imaged list and then point Mala to some cool shadowed text of all the game names that would show up but I'd have to make like 700 plus names (plus god knows how many more before I'm done teaching my cab all the games I want it to know across all the platforms I plan to emulate)

Here's some crap I've done so far....  What do you think?

http://www.flickr.com/photos/71971293@N05/6503524693/#

[harveybirdman]

Got an idea on how to deal with both issues.  Going to search font with an inherrant background, like this

[harveybirdman]

Progress, but still craptacular

http://www.flickr.com/photos/71971293@N05/6523851321/#

[wol-nz]

Interesting idea - but i'm unsure if you can get a 'good' result.
The text will always obscure the snap, and the snap will always dominate the text.

Is it possible you could create a darkish translucent area where the text will overlay. I guess the easiest way to give you an example is when TV has subtitles and they colourize the background to make the text more readable with out obscuring the background detail.

[harveybirdman]

Yeah I'm starting to think seriously about abandoning the idea altogether.

Honestly I had more fun making the group of arcade characters than messing with the game list stuff.

Your stuff is freaking awesome, only reason I haven't just abandoned making my own layout all together in favor of one of your layouts or one of the other bad ass ones is that nothing seems to fit the motif of what I have in mind for my cabinet.  Plus I really don't want too much game specific type stuff.

And since I went about trying to make my own layout, I've been wracking my brain for ways to try to make it unique.

[BadMouth]

It's probably going to come down to finding a photo editing program that can bulk process the snapshots.  
I can't think of a way to do it in MALA without changing the snaps themselves.

[drventure]

Interesting idea, but I'm with Wallienz, I'm not sure how you'd do that and bring enough highlight to the game names yet not obscure the snap.

The only thing I can think off offhand is to apply a "grayed" effect to ALL of the snaps, to in effect, darken out the area where the text will be. Could possibly make it gradiated.

So so still see the snap, it's just darkened where the text is (a bit like the shutdown effect in Windows).

That would still require batching processing all your snaps.

Hm,mmmm. Actually you MIGHT be able to do a mala addin that processes the snaps dynamically before showing them.

I might play around with that idea.....

[harveybirdman]

going to play around adjacent yet overlapping game list, will post results.

[mike boss]

I think technically you can do it and make it work.
HOWEVER I think that in many instances your list would be obscured from the snap.
Some of the colors will fight, making the text difficult to read.
If you were to apply a filter to the snaps to make them duo-tone, or monochromatic, or anything really I think it would be alotta work.
If you go with a big bulky font I think that too would clutter the look of your layout.
Just my two cents.

I've always liked my list in its own box with a nice clean font that works well when scaled.