Vita:Creating Custom Themes

there is a SCE program called "ThemeTool" which makes it very easy, by using a GUI rather than just manually editing XML files, and u can be smug knowing your doing it the way Sony intended ;)

-- Images

this is easy- for the most part its just making (or resizing/cropping) a bunch of PNG files that are the right resolution that the vita expects.

- icons are 128x128

- backgrounds are 960x512

- the preview images are 480x272

- the icon is 226x128

- page indicator is 22x22

- notification graphic is 120x110

all images have to have 256 indexed colors, the way i do this is using pngquant or Online-converting.com

download it, extract it, now open a notepad, copy the following:

FOR %%i IN (*.png) DO pngquant.exe --force --verbose 256 %%i -o %%i

save it as "go.bat" in the same folder as pngquant exe, with save type set to all files

now just copy all your PNG images to that folder and run 'go.bat' it should put them all in the right folder

-- Audio (BGM)

So uh, Background Audio MUST be in ATRAC9 Format, with 16 bit signed PCM, have a sample rate of 48000hz, a bitrate of 144khz, and be stereo audio, have loop points set, oh and the whole thing has to be below 5MB

The easiest way is to use Silica's At9 Convert Service, and upload an FLAC/MP3/WAV/OGG and click convert, it'll wait for a bit as it uploads and processes then outputs a .AT9 file

it will convert your file to meet all those requirements then convert to at9, so it should just work

as long as the resulting file is <5MB (that's what Sony's theme specifications say anyway ..)

-- Testing

so you made all the icons u wanted, found some nice music for it, got all the options just right, now to test it-

if your using ThemeTool. you can do this by doing File(F) -> ExportDir(E) then selecting an output, the program will acturally verify everything you set so far but errors it could give will be like

" [Screen] -> [Image] : windows.png The image height is invalid.544 / 512(pixel) "

so shouldn't be that hard to fix if u get one,

assuming it goes fine, you should now have a folder containing ur theme, w theme.xml written for you, so copy the folder to ux0:/customtheme and then using Custom Themes Manager select the install from folder option and apply it, and see how it goes!

-- Distribution

So yaay u made a theme!! now how to share it??!

well there are a few places u can share it, r/vitathemes, another popular choice would be psv.altervista.org this would allow it to be downloaded from inside custom themes manager zip the files it outputted and upload them somewhere