Shoutbox

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