February 2010. Well, here’s a little preview of what I’ve been working on for the past two days. My own Portal desktop theme.
I actually started off with just a wallpaper: this guy’s Portal wallpaper Portal wallpaper. Then I started looking for themes and couldn’t find any. So then I started crafting icons for ObjectDock. And well, things just started getting crazy after I decided to delve into Rainlendar. I quickly discovered that Rainlendar wasn’t flexible enough for me and moved on to Rainmeter.
The central piece (at least for me) is the massive date sign. It’s based off of the signs you see at the beginning of every level. It took me a hell of a long time to figure out how to make an image based clock in Rainmeter. I took the numbers from a texture I extracted from the game’s data files and stitched them together into my own little array of numbers for Rainmeter to slice up. The images were a little rough around the edges though, so I had to blur them just a touch. That resulted in a little artifacting near the edges, which I had to clean up if I didn’t want stray pixels lining the bottoms of all my numbers.
Then come the icons. I spent a good amount of time creating them, especially the folder icons. At first they were just folders sitting in my dock, and then had a great idea to create a floating tabbed dock. There weren’t any blank/transparent docks that came with ObjectDock, so I made my own. The little black square is the “custom tab” that I actually have to keep there if I want to be able to drag the dock around. I also had to make little boxed variants of the folders.
There’s this nifty little “serial number” thingamabob that I created too. It’s basically a random three digit number plus the date and time mushed together into one string. It updates every minute. Presto, you have a custom serial number for your desktop!
I’m still trying to figure out how to create a RAM meter that looks like that sectional bar underneath the week counter. But I might just give up on that because I’ve got better things to worry about.
ADDENDUM: I completed the theme to my satisfaction, including the meter. Actually, the meter has been set to reflect the progress through the year. You can download my completed Portal Desktop Themes below, past the break.
