Anyways, this thread is getting hijacked and becoming a FE debate again. Anyone would think we got nothing better to talk about.
Eh don't worry about it. I've had so many of my threads hijaked in the past few weeks that I've already exploded and stopped trying to keep others (and myself) on topic. Besides, this stuff should be useful for anyone wanting to build such a skin or a fe that cudl display such a skin.
That quote cracks me up as well, I have no clue who wrote that writeup.
I can't stand c++ for rapid development. It's more robust, but it is very slow when it comes time to set things up (api calls, fuctions, callbacks ect). All those headers and pre-declerations just slow me down. Mind you I like c++ and understand that in most cases it is the proper choice, it just isn't a good choice for this kind of thing. It allows me more time to work on the artwork/design. And I would like to think that my theory is correct. It seems to me that fes written in "real" langauges seem to have, for lack of a better word, a more "programmerly" look to them. Mind you they aren't poorly built or or ugly, they just look like an engineer made the default skins. Sometimes third partys step up and make em' look "purdy" with new skins, but unfortunately sometimes they don't.
Now when vista becomes the os of choice for cabs, I'll probably be making a totally new fe, using c# and XNA. How cool would that be? A fe that works on windows AND your 360.
Heh funny thing about 3darcade is that peter and I talked regularly when both or fes were brand new and "invented" a lot of the ideas you see as common place today. Peter in particular came up with a lot of cool ideas, and you can thank/blame me for the idea of full skinnability with different types of lists. Not that any of our ideas wouldn't have naturally progressed without us mind you, but in a time when your fe choices were AOS and GL we definately got things moving at a faster pace by showing that it can be done. But like you said, we were ahead of our time. We were running 1+ gig pcs with modern video cards when the average mamer was running a 533 mhz with 128 megs of ram with pos dx 5 card. They got over-looked because, quite simply they didn't run well on the average pc when they were new. Now that they are more established they still get overlooked alot because they are old, and thus don't get a lot of "check out this new release with all the cool features" hype news blurbs.
On a side note, even 3darcade doesn't support more than one video at a time, which is why I could respond to toe's question with a "not really" so quickly. If the most optimized fe out there can't handle it then it can't be handled. At least not exactly like he wants it.
3da can already do a lot of the stuff I am trying to achieve in the "2 1/2 d" skins department. The thing is peter's fe does graphics primarily and list building/filtering as an after-thought. I like to do the opposite, making sure you can build any kind of list you want, without having to resort to manual additions. Because the final step is for me is to put in some true 3d functionality it's been heavy on the coding and light on the design for a while now. So yeah, for a time there it got a lot harder to plug away at dk's code for a few hours every single day like I used to. Now I work on it about once a month. Things are picking up though. I did piddly stuff like j5 and wrappers for the longest time because it's what I like to call "no thought code" and it gives instant gratification. I knew I was "back" though when last week I stayed up for 8 hours working on dk optimizations and got the list generation routine to build over 150 virtual lists and search for the roms in under 30 seconds. I seldom optimize, but when I do it is very rewarding.

I think that dk's release will pretty much go unnoticed to anyone but other developers. I've got a lot of interesting addtions that nobody has thought of yet, but dk has never been very popular, mostly because people tried it back when they had a crappy machine, couldn't get the performance they wanted, and never looked at it again. I just want to make sure it gets out there though, so that we can get some new ideas in this hobby. Honestly if it weren't for a few shining gems like UltraStyle and GameEx (as much as I complain about it, I do like the design, even though I don't care for the interface and layouts) I would say that the fe building community has grown stagnent since )p( and I went into hiding.
And no that isn't a knock on other fes released since then. You can make a fantastic fe without bringing in any new ideas. I just haven't seen a lot of fe's with new ideas.
Oh and p.s. 3d is the way to go.... if you could get tom to make GameEx fully 3d it has decent enough list managment that I might be able to "retire".
Ugh... I think I ruined this thread. If any moderators out there want to split this out then feel free.
Sorry.
