Hey,
I'm currently trying to make some sort of port of Wave11 MSN 7.5 to 8.5 using Plus! Live's brand new skinning system. Now, I haven't skinned for ages and thus I'm still discovering the possibilities of all the new stuff since 7.5. I already managed to do some cool stuff, like porting the minmaxclose buttons and the window title. But now, I stumbled on the gradients used for Wave11 MSN's backgrounds.
As you can see in
this screenshot of Wave11 MSN, the contact list MeArea background isn't an image but a gradient. I managed to extract the UIFILEs of Wave11 MSN 7.5 and found those gradients. I then placed them in the right positions of the new UIFILE, removed the references to the images and hurray, I have a beautiful gradient on my contact list just like in Wave11 MSN!
One of the problems with Wave11 MSN was that colorizing wasn't possible. I now want to break this and make use of rcclr() to let Messenger create colors based on the user's selected color and use these in my gradients. I added some new colors using Plus!' Color elements and use the Intensity value for the right color. But it seems like the gradient() thing doesn't accept rcclr()!
code:
Snippet from my 923 definition UIFILE
This thing is the title bar's gradient. When I use the normal rgb() colors from Wave11 MSN, this works perfectly. However, when I try to use rcclr()s, it fails.
...
<Element id=atom(vapor)/>
<Element Layout=filllayout()>
<element layoutpos=top layout=gridlayout(1,7) height=30>
<element Background=rcclr(59900)/> //This is line 31
<element Background=Gradient(rcclr(59900), rcclr(59901), 0)/> //This is line 32
<element Background=Gradient(rcclr(59901), rcclr(59902), 0)/>
<element Background=rcclr(59902)/>
<element Background=Gradient(rcclr(59902), rcclr(59901), 0)/>
<element Background=Gradient(rcclr(59901), rcclr(59900), 0)/>
<element Background=rcclr(59900)/>
</element>
<Element layout=borderlayout()>
<Element layoutpos=top Layout=borderlayout() id=atom(MWWindowBar)>
...
When I try to start the skin with this and open the contact list, Skin Trace outputs this:
code:
07/12/19 14:36:15| **** The trace has started ****
07/12/19 14:36:15| Skin: Wave11 WLM 0.1
07/12/19 14:36:15| Messenger version: 8.5.1302.1018 (nl-nl)
07/12/19 14:36:15| Messenger Plus! version: 4.50.312
07/12/19 14:36:15| Last definition file loaded: 923
07/12/19 14:36:15| DUIParserFailure: parse error 'rcclr' 32
What do you think? Is this a limitation and will I have to simply use themes in the Skin Options, or would it be possible to actually use "colorized colors" for gradients?
Note: I'm currently just experimenting with the skinning system and am not yet planning to release a Wave11 WLM. If I'd want to release this, I'll first ask permission to the creators (theunknown and Fizical) if they're OK with this. So don't blame me from stealing skins, because this is only for private use at the moment!
/ 
