Beyond the ↑Gates of ↑Hell you’ll ↑find IE—proof above. Through the depths of a hidden subterranean vault, housing his ↵mad ↑de-integration lab, I entered ↑Nathan’s toasty technology page. Besides a definite ↑opinion on Vista you will find a wealth of interesting hacks and general tech savvy Microsoft-bashing. And there are—maybe by far more important, culturally—loads of ↑Doom alpha versions screenshots.
That’s the way my graphical user interface (GUI) meanwhile looks. By means of seemingly unending patience I hunted down a plethora of elements and gradually understood how the whole thing gets composed. First I tried to substitute everything I wanted to use by my own elements and just jettison the rest. This works for the standard applications coming with Windows, but seldomly with third party applications. Although the surfaces of lots of those are especially designed to be used with Windows, they do not readily adopt my changes, but stubbornly display elements of their own choice and looks. I found out that disabling or even deleting parts of the elements is not a good idea, because—I guess this is due to Microsoft’s visual style policy—the interface designers reach down into the elements storage’s every cellar’s very last corner in order to find something that suits their purposes or vision. For example you force the menu bar to be displayed in a certain way, launch some application, and find out that it doesn’t comply. A little research unearths the fact that the particular menu bar does not use the menu bar definitions, but e.g. the systems button definitions. And so on. Till now I can not fathom where the hell the looks of Star Office’s menu bar are stored … whatever I do, it just remains an ugly grey—maybe it is located within Star Office itself … gotta resource hack that. All in all, the organisation of the elements for the Windows GUI seems to me a complete chaos. There of course is order and logic—desperately needed to make the whole thing run, and indeed runs, quite flawless—but the logical rule set for interlinking the different elements could be a lot more simple, if there would be way less redundant elements. Mind, I am really not sure if I have understood everything correctly, but let us take the close, restore, minimize, and maximize buttons to the top right of every window as an example. The functionality and interlinking logic is perfect. But there are several ways this buttons are generated. Firstly there are graphics files containing the backgrounds and signs of every button in every state they can adopt (normal, pressed, mouse over, etc.). Secondly there are graphics files only displaying the button backgrounds in every state. To make this empty buttons meaningful, a “glyph”—a graphical sign like e.g an arrow—has to be overlayed. Fine idea. That way you could have only one graphics file for describing buttons (containing every state a button can assume) for the whole GUI. Which state-frames are used then are defined at every instance of usage, and the function visually gets defined by an overlay glyph. But both strategies—”complete” graphics file and button background plus glyph—are used by the Windows GUI and get merrily mixed up. The hell, why? Well, I can imagine why. From Windows version to Windows version new features simply are added on top of the old stuff, and a real clean up is never done. But, I have to confess, it is tremendous fun to mess around with that chaos and make it your very own chaos.
↑Napoleon Chagnon ↑blogs at ↑Savage Minds and ↑Dustin M. Wax works for ↑Homeland Security … *<:o)
the hard and dark side of modding
Last night’s better part I spent with ↑Resource Hacker, prying open certain system files and having healthy looks at their contents. Having looked long enough made me start to understand how WinXP’s graphical user interface (GUI) works. Then I found the two articles ↑Windows XP and skinning and ↑The skinning primer: A comprehensive look at Windows customization by Brad Wardell. Both are excellent reads and give you a true understanding of how Windows creates the graphics of the interface you see on your screen—if you use Windows, that is. If you want to go into details, like of which elements a window is composed and so on, the ↑Skinning Guide [also as ↑.pdf | 1.6MB] for ↑Stardock‘s ↑WindowBlinds is a comprehensive and understandable source. Brad Wardell himself works for Stardock and therefore his articles naturally are a bit biased in terms of advocating WindowBlinds and other Stardock products. But in every article Wardell states so himself, and you have to be fair: Although Stardock meanwhile is a ‘Gold Certified Microsoft Partner’, their product palette consists of shareware plus the random bit of freeware. Anyway, what I am driving at is the cultural difference between modders and professional customizers.
All time favourites of Windows GUI-modding are changing the looks of the start button and the boot screen. There are ↑several ways for replacing the start button, among which the ↑manual procedure has the most appeal. Ah yes, the classic way involves a little bit of ↑disabling the system file checker and ↑modifying system files. In the case of the Windows start button it is explorer.exe, which has to be modified—the ↑shell of the system—be brave and do not hesitate to put the ghost into it. And now hold your breath, because it becomes even better … here is a classic tutorial for ↑modifying your WinXP boot logo. It involves patching the very heart of the darkness Windows is, the operating system’s (OS) ↑kernel himself :-) [Before messing around with the kernel it just may be not too bad an idea to make a backup copy of it. I just couldn’t resist and had to rename my backup of ntoskernel.exe into kurtz.exe. Got it? … say aloud: “Kernel Kurtz”]
The professional Brad Wardell is horror-stricken: “Just the thought that someone was patching their OS kernel to have a new boot screen sends shivers down my spine.” Well, it sends shivers down the spine of those who do it, too—they appreciate the shivers, Wardell doesn’t, although he nicely describes some ideological background of GUI-modding in his primer:
Changing the interrelationships between artefacts and human beings is a, maybe the decisive aspect of sociocultural appropriation. This very much is manifested in the obviously insane stunt of tinkering with your operating system’s very core, risking to ruin everything, only to replace an insignificant picture, 640×480 pixels in dimensions, equipped with a meager palette of 16 colours, which you only see for some seconds when booting your machine. The replaced picture is not essential, it is only the symptom. Essential is the practice of fucking around with the kernel for no apparent reason, and then the awareness of having done so.
resistance against aero glass
Upgrading your hardware for tilting your windows “threedimensionally” on your desktop, as ↵Madotate did for Win2k already years ago? For having simulated plexiglass frames around your windows? Well, I ↵did not buy one of the new Sony LCD-televisions, exactly because they have a physical plexiglass rim, in turn cheaply metal-framed—sharp edges, corners, and all. A true masterpiece of design. If you opt for a mid-sized device and place it on the floor, the upper needle-pointed corners are exactly at the height of little children’s eyes, and perfectly placed to rip open every passing-by adult’s upper limb. That can’t happen with Vista’s Aero Glass windows, granted. They have rounded corners, I know. Anyway, I ↵upgraded my hardware significantly—my machine would swallow Vista without recognizing, but I did not install it. Instead I again opted for XP Pro, because from everything I read and saw, I do not see what edge Vista could give me. Furthermore I am used to XP, it runs perfectly stable, and has everything I need. In fact it has way too much for my taste when it comes down to the graphical user interface (GUI). It is always the same with me … every time I get a new system I more or less immediately start to tweak it to my taste. At first in terms of performance, but sooner or later in terms of look and feel of the operating system (OS) as well. During the last days I had something like a backflash to the times when I first got Win2k. Back then I dived headfirst into GUI modding and more. Do you remember the time, when there was the race for completely exchanging Win2k’s bootscreen and logon/-off windows? One file name I will always remember: msgina.dll. Because of the “Gina” in it, in my mind I always pictured it as some Italian woman, Monica-Bellucci style. Sick that is? Well, you can’t do nothing against them associations. As far as I recall, the mentioned .dll contained the bitmaps for the logon/-off windows. Once resource-hacked, you were able to substitute the .bmps by your own ones. Ah, those were the days … With GUI-modding it seems to be just the same as with casemodding—it became a professionalized business, at least in parts. But there of course still is the real thing around on the Net, still going strong. This morning I restumbled into a website I knew from ye olde days: ↑virtual plastic—it has everything you need, if you want to change the looks of your windows-OS manually, by haunting its innards. Now for my project. I want to erect a beacon of hope against the resource-hungry design craze of Aero Glass and the like. My XP Pro will be stripped of every single bit of so-called funky “design”, I want a perfectly flat thing, uncolourful. I want this style from the very moment on I hit the ignition button of my machine. I do not want to through a skin over the GUI, I want the thing itself permanently changed. During the weekend I started by designing some flat icons for the desktop [see above]. They are ↑real .ico files, have transparency, and contain 128×128, 64×64, 48×48, 32×32, 24×24, and 16×16 pixels versions. I am not yet content with their looks. Once I am, and once the set is complete, I’ll release the whole pack. Having clear-cut, easy-to-recognice icons renders the text beneath them superfluous. To get rid of it was easy in 2k, but is a little awkward in XP. Next task to accomplish …
↑Wired reports: “Earlier this month, French Culture Minister Renaud Donnedieu de Vabres inducted three game designers into the prestigious Ordre des Arts et des Lettres (Order of Arts and Literature) as chevaliers, or knights: Peter Molyneux (Populous and Black & White), Eric Viennot (Missing) and Antoine Villette (Alone in the Dark: The New Nightmare).”
↑Being not truthful is an installation by ↑Ralph Ammer which allows a ‘spectator’ to interact with a projected animation by gestures. Watch the video [↑24MB | .mov or ↑9MB | .mov] to see sheer magic and have the thing explained.
Walking, running, flying, and teleporting around a vast flat world, almost free to explore, surely is one of the key features which make up “↑Second Life“‘s (SL) attractivity. Another key feature is the high moddability of your personal avatar. You not only can change clothes by drag and drop, but your whole appearance as well. For example every single female avatar I met so far had the looks of a gorgeous top model, see ↵people. Even at the top notch graphics settings I am running SL at those avatars and their outfits look pretty much perfect. So I deem them to be professional products, not the results of everyday users frickling about. In other words, they are bought. Everybody I asked about that readily confessed accordingly. All right people, although I am a complete n00b in SL terms, you still are dealing with a veteran game modder here. Before I am going to buy a 3D-mesh, I will run around with the generic avatar till the end of days. That of course is in a way cool ;-) but a little unsatisfactory.
Having gotten a little tired and bored from my journeys I settled at a convenient place, opened up the appearance menu and started to fool around. Once I had found the sliders for controlling the skin colour, and having achieved some azure blue, I remembered yet another childhood hero of mine: ↑Fantomas as interpreted by ↑Jean Marais in ↑André Hunebelle‘s movie trilogy. What fascinated me so much as a kid, was that Fantomas is the master of disguise, able to impersonate everyone to perfection. Well, in SL everybody has this ability, at least concerning outward appearance. So I thought let’s try to achieve the generic look of the master of disguises, and further on run around in this very shape all the time, without changing appearance anymore. Some clandestine twisted joke that would be, just like the ↵“Zephyrin Raymaker” thing. Right to my taste.
On the left screen I ran SL in a window, on the right screen I fired up a browser and started to hunt down Jean Marais as Fantomas. As far as I can remember the movies, the center pic is from the first one, the right one from the final scene of the second. The female in the background is doctored in by somebody, she doesn’t appear in the movie. The pic to the far left may stem from the third and final movie of the trilogy, but I am not sure. Having this pictures plus some more open on the right screen, I tried to shape my avatar’s head accordingly on the left screen.
That’s the best I could cook up so far with the ingame interface for changing the avatar’s shape. The problem is threefold. First of all the ingame interface of course is by far less powerful than a real 3D-visualization application like 3dsmax, Maya, or even Milkshape. Secondly my quick’n’dirty online search for reference pictures generated poor material. Thirdly, the appearance of Fantomas in the three movies by Hunebelle changes significantly. That starts with his skin colour, which ranges from blueish, via bluegray, greengray, greenish, to flat grey. The facial features of the latex mask also change very much, even within one and the same movie. Word has it that there’s a box around for purchase, containing all three movies, and maybe bonus material, on DVDs. So I’ll check the local dealers and catch the DVDs. Furthermore I downloaded some of the so-called developer content for “Second Life”, like an avatar mesh, templates for the textures, and the like. Things to come …
Starting to only making things worse by going on to distort the head, I decided to do some more travelling and try to find some surroundings and ambience matching my “new” avatar, and what I associate with it. At “Nexus Prime”, which is situated in a patch called “Gibson”, I found this spaceship featuring a late sixties/early seventies pimpy plush interior.
Somewhere other I found the perfect item. A trashy Jules-Verne-goes-high-tech style submarine. At the end of the first of Hunebelle’s Fantomas movies, Fantomas escapes in a little submarine, which in a way comes close to the one depicted. By the way, the illustration accompanying ↵pulp surrealism shows Fantomas inside that very submarine, giving orders to his skipper. Yes, indeed, that’s the kind of movies I watched over and over again as a kid. Little mosaic parts falling into place.
Just minutes before SL crashed on me, some glitch threw my avatar back into an even more generic appearance, reminiscent of the original Fantomas silent movies by ↑Louis Feuillade …