we are working on the 365 skin and have added a lot of themes etc and it all looks really cool, however at present it has a filesize of 11.1MB and most email accounts cant receive files that large, i however can send files as large as 20MB cause i use hotmail.

my problem is how would i sumbit my skin to the skins database when i finish it if you cant receive it due to its size, ive tried reducing the filesize of images but it causes them to look awful as in that it makes them more stretched out so you cant see all of the background which in turn makes my skin look tacky.

if anybody can help me itd be greatly appreciated, i know i can put the file on an external server and just link to it but its nice to have it in the database if you know what i mean.

Upload to skydrive and then give the link to the file in an email?

If you contact me, I can host it for you, if you want

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Originally posted by MeEtc
If you contact me, I can host it for you, if you want

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I'm sure if you just upload it to a web server and send a skin submission email explaining your situation, Menthix won't mind.
I doubt he has a limit imposed on attachment size anyway though.

Are you sure your skin has to be this size though?

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Originally posted by Volv
I'm sure if you just upload it to a web server and send a skin submission email explaining your situation, Menthix won't mind.
I doubt he has a limit imposed on attachment size anyway though.

Are you sure your skin has to be this size though?

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I really think you should just split them up then it was a good idea i guess at first but if it's getting to be over 10MB then i think something needs to be changed. Especially as the skins kinda not related at all. unlike sunshines skylines where the themes only change a few images yours is like a whole new skin each time and that really should be split up, maybe you can just give their names similar tags 365: Beach 365: Sring 365: summer etc, that way you can see which is more popular and easily fix bugs and re-distribute rather than make another hefty 50mb file each time

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Originally posted by Volv
I'm sure if you just upload it to a web server and send a skin submission email explaining your situation, Menthix won't mind.
I doubt he has a limit imposed on attachment size anyway though.

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Originally posted by freak544
I am also concerned that our skin has under half of the skins we intend to have so in theory our skin pack could be 50mb when its complete

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Stuart tryed to compress the pictures before and when he done this the pictures were over stretched so instead of seeing the whole picture you only saw like 3/4's of it

I will get Stuart to send you it when he has added the buddy icons into it to see what we can do

50mb overall will be alot and i like the idea of breaking it down into smaller packs like a pack for the winter events, pack for winter events etc... (I have worked out that it would be atleast 30mb so a few things may need to be changed)

I will have to have a lil discussion with stuart and see what we decide to do

upload your skin somewhere and link it here, i'm sure somebody will take a look at optimizing it.

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Originally posted by ShawnZ
upload your skin somewhere and link it here, i'm sure somebody will take a look at optimizing it.

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i dont have too much of an objection to breaking it down into seperate skins, it would atleast give me a fix to my word wheel problem, however when we started talking about making seperate skins a few weeks back it was suggested that we made one big one that had everything.

alot of the weight of this skin is comprised of the backgrounds, just the backgrounds alone comees to 5.96MB, we have taken out all unneeded files a few weeks ago which did cut it down by about 1MB but im not really sure what else can be done to be honest.

once ive added in status icons ill send it to you menthix although im not sure how right now. the reason why it cant go by email is as follows, you get your email from a pop server for example pop.ntlworld.com, those servers allow each user a maximum size for there mailbox, in the case of hotmail thats 10GB but in the case of ntl now known as virgin media its 10MB.

i know for a fact that whoever jason uses as an ISP dont allow him to receive emails this large and i assume that messenger plus tries to use a relatively cheap domain so you allow so many megs for skins, scripts sound packs the plus installer etc but wont get much megs for email i would presume.

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Originally posted by stuartbennett
i assume that messenger plus tries to use a relatively cheap domain so you allow so many megs for skins, scripts sound packs the plus installer etc but wont get much megs for email i would presume

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ok menthix thanks for that, i will get status icons added to the defaul theme and get min max close buttons replicated to the other windows and will then send to you to see if theres anything you can do for us regarding the filesize, thanks again menthix i really appreciate this.

I am also on virgin media (was ntl) so my attachment limit is 10mb I hope we can shorten down our skin pack but if not I suppose splitting in in half will be the only other option

Me and stuart will discuss this after menthix has helped us to try and shorten it down

ok menthix ive emailed that to you on the skins submission email address with the subject line "image optimisation" i havent had any delivery status failure messages come back yet, hopefully thats a good sign.

we hope that youll be able to help us and we really do appreciate any help you can give us with this.

Stuart just sent me a PM saying he's using Fireworks to edit the image. I'll say the same thing here as in my reply. Fireworks by default will save its PNG images in a layered format to continue allow editing This will usually make an image filesize 2-3x larger than what it should be. Saving the file as type 'Flattened PNG' instead of 'Fireworks PNG' will fix this.

ok meetc ill give that a go however do you know if that will cause the overstretching effect i mentioned earlier?

EDIT:

i tried this there is no flattened png option when doing a save as in fireworks mx, i did originally start out with fireworks cs3 which might of had such an option but i dont have any serial numbers for that but do have serial numbers for fireworks mx, the best i could do was to do a ctrl+a and go modify > flattern selection doing that and resaving only shaves 2kb of the filesize however.

i tried doing as a png 8 a few weeks ago instead of the current png32 but that resulted in overstretched images which is a compromise that neither me nor jason are willing to make.

I'm not sure, but it shouldn't. Just make sure to make a copy of all your raw images before you save them as flattened. otherwise, there's no way to get the layer information back

if you have photoshop there's a function in there to save pictures for the web (Ctrl+ Alt + Shift + A)

that's what i did on mine, initially they're layered pngs in fireworks, but i reduced the skin to under half size (11mb-5mb) by using this method of optimising them

I will have a look into this now stuart to see if there is a way of me making the images smaller as last time it was done they were over stretched so there must be a way of doing it in fireworks and as for photoshop i don't have it so that one is kind of out the window

Edit: PNG8 makes them stretched but PNG24 makes them look ok well for 1 of the skins I will make them all PNG24's rather than PNG36 tomorrow when I have more time unless there is another way to compress them in fireworks (I went to export preview then changed from PNG32 to PNG 24)

ok Jason i put all the background down to png 24 in all of our themes, in the themes ive tested theres no overstretching effect and it therefore seems to be ok, however we arent saving that much its gone from 11.8MB to 8.34MB, while that is impressive we have to consider that we still have more themes to add so when completed its still going to be more than 15MB when we are done.

however what i havent done is go and convert every image down from png32 to png24 i only did the background, the text images and status icons, theme icons, gradient images and min max close buttons may only be like 30kb each but when you have enough of theme it soon mounts up. it would be interesting to see how much we save by taking them all down to png 24.

EDIT:

jason i did want to clear something up about virgin media, you can attach any size files to your email on any isp, the problem is that file attachments in and of themselves contribute to the overall size of your message, so for example you can send or receive 10 emails of size 1MB each or 1 email thats 10MB, so if you had a completely empty mailbox at this moment in time i could theorectically send you our skin (8.34MB) but then you could only receive a furth 1.66MB of other email after that anyone else trying to send you email will get a delivery status failure message stating that message delivery failed because your mailbox is full and until you then retreived your mail thus clearing it off the mail server nobody would be able to send you any email.

each ISP sets there own limits as to what size mailboxes there customers get, some ISP's may even have a multi-tier system where if you pay so much for the silver service you get 10MB mailbox if you pay for the gold you get 15MB NOTE: those numbers are theorectical to my knowledge they dont actually represent an ISP that im aware of they are just an example.

i just thought it was worth clearing up any confusion regarding sending and receiving attachments via email.

EDIT:

i have encountered a problem, when i changed imaged images like the dashboard header etc to png24 ive discovered that it actually causes the whole window to go invisible, in default theme the result was that the ads from microsoft were visible but everything else was entirely painted over in like brilliant white emulsion you could click on things and they were there to use but as everything was white you couldnt really see what you were doing, does anybody know why this has happened?

i tested a possibility and heres what i have discovered, the following images can never ever ever be saved as png 24.

buddy images
min, max & close buttons
any custom buttons
corner images

the only thing i know is common to all of these images is they have metadata tags defined on them in skininfo and it would appear that metadata cant be applied to png24 type images.

EDIT:

its not the metadata that causes the problem its images with transparent elements like a few of the word wheel images etc, so ive done all the images with no transparent elements in them and i got the filesize down to 5.71MB, still a bit big and im concerned that once we add the remaining themes itll be back up to 10MB even with keeping up this image optimisation.

Nice long post stuart yeah aslong as it don't go over 10mb I think we should be ok and I use windows mail to get my emails anyway and have never had problems getting my emails as I think that once I have them then there not on the server but not sure on that one I didn't leanr much about emails as college only ththe basics of email really

once you retreive them your mailbox on the server gets emptied but between mail retreivals if it goes over 10MB then people will find they cant send you mail.

Back to getting the .plsk smaller . Stuart: I just replied to your mail.

Basically, i got the .plsk size down from 11.8MB to 2.73MB by removing duplicate files and optimizing images.

To check for duplicate files: DoubleKiller
To optimize images: XnView. If you don't like installing you can get the ZIP version. Once in XnView go to Tools > Batch Processing.

More details are in Stuart's mail, but this should get people with the same problem pointed in the right direction.

thanks menthix, i did the xnview thing and got my already optimised pack of size 5.73mb down to 2.91mb, i have used the doublekiller the reason being most themes use seperate copies of the uifiles for a reason and just using one copy of each uiifile stored in a central directory would cause huge display problems.

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Originally posted by stuartbennett
thanks menthix, i did the xnview thing and got my already optimised pack of size 5.73mb down to 2.91mb, i have used the doublekiller the reason being most themes use seperate copies of the uifiles for a reason and just using one copy of each uiifile stored in a central directory would cause huge display problems.

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