PLEASE.....

Anyone up for making a video tutorial? or a series of short vids on making MSN skins...eg: like the ones for Photoshop etc on Youtube would be much better for people that find it easyier to actually watch how sumthing is done rather than read and get confused.

Can sumone get hold of Willz and try an persuade him to make sum..or can anyone else thats compident in making MNS skins have a go please.

I know i certainly do better at things when i can watch how its actually done and i think others will agree with me.

Any and All respones welcome

it's all very well.... but it's mostly code. that'd be a crap video, with dodgy resolution and compression involved too it'd suck. We've got enough text tutorials for stuff like this I feel.

Well i find that the Photoshop Tuts are fine to watch and the zoom command would do nicely.

I just feel that there shud be more visual parts to the guide with screen shots etc.. I mean for example with the"CAT Head" shape there should have been an example of how that image was used in the XML.

But noo it just went onto how to use Rectangles..

As i too have a mask for my shape and a back ground image but i can only get one or the other to work.. either the shape or the picture

Wud be ideal if there was a complete tutorial on how again for eg: the "ironman" or "batman" skins were made.

Sorry for any bad spelling or gramma

Well, we cannot wait for Willz to do everything. He is the best in skinning and there is no doubt about that but he has already done too much to help new skinners. He created OpenLive, he is writing a skinning wiki at the moment and he has already written 4 useful guides with skinning techniques. After you get used to the basic skinning engine with all that stuff, you will be able to understand more advanced techniques like shaped skins etc.

Ok i get it just have to make do then..


Just a lil frustrating cos i have everything i want ready and i cant put it into action because i dont under stand it fully....

for example my shape has a small indentation on eitehr side of the skin and wen you sign in it courses it to take a small chunck outa the contact list and on the left the link buttons... but if u look on "Ironman" his contact list is still contatined within plus his skin over hangs the orignal size of the window...

Im feeling like i already wanna give up..

In IronMan, the contact list isn't bigger that the original size. I thought that too but what Willz did is he created a smaller window and padded everything inside and then he added pictures in the 4 edges.

lol ok so am i right in saying that u cant go any bigger than 100%? and by padding u mean reduced everything inside of the window?

If so How do you pad anything? lol please help if u can...

i think im also getting confused cos Ironman has so many layers lol

quote:

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Originally posted by BradT
lol ok so am i right in saying that u cant go any bigger than 100%? and by padding u mean reduced everything inside of the window?

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Oh god i have so much to learn.   

KK Thanks again i think ill just read the guides over and over till its drilled into my head then ill experiment and go from there

Shaped skinning is hard,you have to take into account all the padding and think of stuff like a grid.

Padding is the messengers way of saying how many pixels an object/s needs to be pushed in from the Left, Top, Right and Bottom I'm sure you've encountered it already.

Willz iron man/batman/whatever basically removes a chunk of the rectangle of messenger shaped like whatever, he sets it with UMargins so that those parts of messenger are not stretched when messenger is reszed, he tells messenger to remove those shapes from each corner, as you would see if you looked at his SkinInfo.xml

Then in messenger his background matches the shapes that have been taken out so it looks like it's natural and fits.

But of course messenger still thinks the borders are on the exact outside, so you need to adjust the borders (this is all in the documentation) telling it to come in by 15 pixels etc.

Honestly mate the best thing is to just look at examples of the skins you like and try to do something similar with a new skin based on the examples code.

How about this: Try making a skin shaped like  a war medal

You'll need to subtract the corners with images with a shape like this (rotating as necessary)
        ___
       |     |
___/       |
|_______|

Then play about with the padding in the definitions, till everything is visible again and not cut out. From memory it'll be the window icon and text, minmaxclosebar, possibly the display picture, display name, status, personal message bar, dashboard, then the bottom of the contact list.

This is a fairly simple exercise and you'll learn a lot, good shaped skinning currently IS HARD! Don't be fooled, ever think that there's more than likely a reason there are very few if any shaped skins in the database.

Theres nothing i can see in anyof the guides that mentions hows to move the elements?!

Yeah video tutorials..... lol no way

Ok one thing people think is that skins is something you can do in about 5-30 mins (like most video tutorials).

With skins its something that would take a LOT longer and would drain whoever has to actually make the video tutorials. For example the Ironman skin took 1 week to develop and that is with me knowing what I am doing

To actually break that up and explain that it would take far too much time which most people don't really have.

With skinning, the best thing to do is learn XML and CSS first and then things will be a lot more clearer. Its pretty much all trial and error in the end anyway.

But if someone wants to do it then do it.... but yeah don't expect anything from me Its almost depressing to think about doing it.

sorry my previous reply was posted secs after urs i will look now.. thanks

HAHAH Thanks Willz for you input..Your  a LEGEND! Keep up the excellent work

No willz is a FREE MAN!

Yeah he's good though but seriously it is very draining.

aNileator how do i post images like u withouht havin to start a new thread? i cant see an attach link anywhere

it's standard BBCode mate, look in the help section of this website