Xion Audio Player

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Skinning Questions, Suggestions and Ideas

Postby FordGT » October 1st, 2006, 7:28 am

Cliff, I noticed that when you uploaded my skins use changed something to allow them display faster. What do you do to them? Before you fixed them the mouse over buttons would take forever to display but now they're lightning fast. Is there something I'm not doing correctly? :?
Ford GT. It's The One.
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Postby Cliff Cawley » October 1st, 2006, 9:29 am

FordGT Wrote:Before you fixed them the mouse over buttons would take forever to display but now they're lightning fast. Is there something I'm not doing correctly

I basically just optimized the skin as follows:

1) Merged any layers that were just part of the background skin. This way Xion only has 1 or 2 layers to render for the background, instead of 10+. Any decorations, etc can all be merged together. The less layers you use, the less Xion will have to draw. When Xion draws, it draws the first layer, then the next, then the next, etc. So when you have a lot of overlapping layers that don't change, its best to merge them together.

2) Cropped the skin size to remove any extra transparent areas around the edges. This actually means that less memory is consumed, as Xion doesn't have to store the extra 'transparent' pixel data. It's hard for Xion to anticipate if certain areas will always be transparent, so its best to help as much as you can.

That's pretty much what I do with everyone's skins when they come in. I might add a section to the help on optimizing, but see how you go for now :)

Cliff :)
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http://xion.r2.com.au
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