KSplash and Liquid Alchemy

It's a new week, and after an entire weekend of just not doing much at all. With the amount of random testing of the KSplashX engine last week, I found some small tidbits here and there without much to offer in terms of making some really fancy looking splash screens. Sure you could add animations here and there using animated images which in and of itself is a LOT of work simply because each frame has to be made and then organized into a single image. I also found out that trying to put a fullscreen animated image isn't something that works, and so I gave up on that front :D.

Instead I decided to take a look at the QML engine and of course that mean bumbling my way through any of the QML that I could get to at least look how I wanted (whether or not it is the most blasphemous piece of code, I don't know). So I played around with the animation and made myself a mandatory Miku related splash theme (it's my go-to topic when I can't think of one). Since I wanted to play with QML particles, I originally was thinking of a starry theme...but due to laziness, I made the stars in gimp using the fuzzy circle paintbrush...meaning my stars looked more like floating balls of fluff. After finding out that I actually can't even play with rotating and multi-sized particles that seem to be in QtQuick 2.0 (old tech WHY), I decided to ditch the star theme for a snow one because that totally made sense ._.

With that, I slapped together a QML made background (a.k.a. rectangle with a gradient) along with a couple different sizes of my snow particle image to make some different sized snow fall all around. Of course, I added the quintessential Miku render (taken from some guy who probably didn't ask for permission to render it anyways ._.) on top of the smaller particles of snow and kept the larger ones able to float over the render, because nobody likes eyecandy that skimps on layers....and BAM, rudimentary splash screen complete...without any care for the loading stage of the desktop, making it literally just a picture with Miku and falling snow. Being the kind of guy that needs just a little more than that, I originally wanted to copy a design from a wallpaper...and then decided to say forget it because apparently I can't make arcs with QML (I was hoping to animated a circle being made using QML, but that didn't happen). Not only that, I couldn't figure out how to actually toggle animations without putting the animations inside the thing I wanted to have animated and using the "behavior on blah" element. So suffice to say, some of the shit of QML just doesn't make sense to me at the moment, probably because I am looking at it wrong. 

In the end, I settled for just copying the bars over and simplifying the idea to something that wouldn't require me to make an animation because effort just isn't in my vocabulary apparently. With some minor tweaks and hopefully some stuff that would make the splash screen look close to the same regardless of screen resolution, I stamped it with done and posted it on KDE-Look. Since the animation itself would be kind of a hassle to make (no screen recording programs at the moment) and I'm actually not COMPLETELY done with the splash just yet, I'll just post a screenshot of how it is supposed to look when everything has loaded.

Of course, in terms of what I'm going to do to finish this splashscreen, it doesn't have anything to do with the QML or even the animation, but rather adding a splash sound to go along with the animation during loading because apparently you can do that. All it takes is a simple script in the ~/.kde4/env that plays an audio file (aplay or mpg123, etc) and of course an audio file somewhere. Hopefully I'll find an audio clip that matches the atmosphere I want, otherwise it isn't that bad of a splash screen even alone right? RIGHT ME? 

Anyways, that ends my rant on KSplash along with the main chunk of my adventures about it. I'm hoping to add a lot more anime related KSplashes to KDE-Look and stuff for anime lovers that obviously couldn't care less about me anyways :/...*cough cough*#FansubStatus*cough cough*...and not those shitty kinds of splash screens where it's like "o hay I moved around the icons and replaced the background" or something like that because when I say eyecandy, I MEAN EYECANDY.

Maybe one day I'll even make an otaku-related respin of Arch or something because OBVIOUSLY those work...said no one ever. Even then, it would be nice to have myself a respin so I don't have to use so much effort reinstalling stuff and trying to remember what themes/etc. I used before...So I guess it would be more of a personal respin rather than a public one, BUT HEY I could always force my opinion onto others. The only real issue is making a coherent theme/style/w.e for GTK2/3, KDE, Openbox, Fluxbox, etc. so I probably won't end up doing that due to laziness.