My first skin is published! (it's not so bad) - Page 2

Jellby · 9th April 2002, 21:46

The new version is more or less finished, I still want to make something with text.bmp, skin some additional component(s) and, maybe, some avs(wvs) preset (if I find out how), but I think the basic is nearly complete. There is one little problem: it is too big for 1001skins (309 KB, and yes, I tried the 'decreaser' and even more: made all unused areas yellow) and I would like some other people (not me) to test it. Would you mind if I post it here in 3 or 4 different pieces?

Atmo · 9th April 2002, 21:53

309kb is pretty huge...how many components have you skinned???

Ive done skins with everything but micro skinned (main, eq, pl, avs, mb, cursors) and it's been under 200kb...

Are there any duplicate files or anything that you've got in there??

Jellby · 9th April 2002, 22:01

No, nothing uncommon... I've skinned the standard (with avs and cursors with a little animation, but that's not the problem) and mikro (with the inside of mb).

27 cursors + 5 txt files = 138 KB
mikro.bmp + mbinner.bmp =67.3 KB

the big files are:

eqmain.bmp : 255 KB
pledit.bmp : 153 KB

the rest are 10-90 KB

without eqmain.bmp, the zip is 247 KB

Atmo · 9th April 2002, 22:05

Interesting....my robnation skin is 947kb unzipped...yet only 206kb zipped...

What zip program are you using??

Jellby · 9th April 2002, 22:17

Plain winzip, with winace I get the same result (maximum compression, of course). Total size unzipped: 1 294 684 Bytes. With Robnation's compression rate it'd still be 274 KB. I guess it's too colourful, even being all yellow

Atmo · 9th April 2002, 22:20

Try submitting it to deviantart....they dont have a file size restriction as far as i know...

Jellby · 9th April 2002, 22:46

It's there now:
http://www.deviantart.com/deviation.php?id=273511

Please download it and bug-test it. Any comments are welcome. Thank you.

Atmo · 9th April 2002, 22:55

Nice....no bugs as far as i can tell

Jellby · 10th April 2002, 15:02

[advertising]Did you see today's (Apr 9, 2002) Daily Deviation at deviantart.com? Go and check it[/advertising]

StillWater · 11th April 2002, 14:02

Jellby, that's really strange that your skin is so big, since the colours don't seem so complicated (unlike eg. a photo/picture skin)

I don't know if this'll work well, but it might:
If you really want to downsize it, then try converting the BMPs to JPGs, which will simplify the image a bit without losing too much quality. Then convert them back into BMPs - hopefully they'll then compress smaller.

Atmo · 11th April 2002, 14:44

Converting to .jpg would cause quality loss...300k isnt too bad anyways...

However......

Seeing as the main portion of this skin is shades of yellow, i believe that it would be possible to convert each bitmap back to 8 bit (256 color) without any quality loss...

Should cut the size in half at least..

Jellby · 11th April 2002, 15:06

I tried converting eqmain.bmp to 256 colours, but I got ugly artifacts in the titlebar highlight and in the eq-vis area... But I'll keep trying different methods, programs, etc. thank you for your suggestions.

Atmo · 11th April 2002, 15:18

Which paint program are you using??

Try an optimised median cut to the nearest color if youre using psp...if you'd like i could do it for you...wouldnt take long.

Jellby · 11th April 2002, 15:31

I used Photoshop6, and tried all dither options, I liked none

But it was a rather quick try, as a last resort I can publish a low-quality version in 1001 and tell where to find the good one.

Atmo · 11th April 2002, 15:37

Dont use dither...it'll just make it look weird...if photoshop doesnt have a replace color option rather than dither i'll do it in psp...

Jellby · 11th April 2002, 15:46

One of the dither options is 'none'

I don't remember the exact names, and even if I did they are not in English (and I'm not at home now), but I tried every palette option, even 'web-colours' (horrible!)

Atmo · 11th April 2002, 15:58

Ok...in ps 6:

Go to image > Mode > indexed color.

Set the pallette to Local (adaptive)

Colors to 256

Ditther to none...

Should work like that

I just tried it myself on one of my skins and couldnt notice the difference between 24 bit and 8 bit images..

Jellby · 11th April 2002, 16:04

Did you try with mine? If I remember correctly, I tried, and there were visible artifacts.

Spectrus_Wolfus · 11th April 2002, 16:13

[O/T] *looks at atmo* speaking of ps 6 lol

[O/T]

Atmo · 11th April 2002, 16:26

I just tried with yours...just the bigger bitmaps...got it back to 170kb...with no image quality loss...if you pm me with an email adress i'll send it to you.

Jellby · 11th April 2002, 16:31

Thank you, I'll give it another try this evening and tell you.

Atmo · 11th April 2002, 16:36

I think you could get it even smaller though...by changing everything back to 256 colors it should be possible to get it back to 130kb or so...considering that you've skinned pretty much everything possible thats not too bad at all..

Jellby · 11th April 2002, 18:44

Finally, I've managed to get a file less than 250KB, but I worked the other way round: I converted the smallest (less colourful) files first, so the quality loss isn't noticed. And, at least in my computer, there is a not-negligible quality loss (see the attachment), and I didn't want the main windows with those artifacts, so I converted cbuttons, text, shuffrep... and I left out the unused cursors (wsmin, wsclose, wswinbut, volbar) and numbers (because I had nums_ex).
I've submitted it to 1001 and I'll tell you when it's published (do you know how long it takes?). There are some little updates from the version at deviantart: text.bmp, kb/s & kHz, background mb colour.

Thank you for your help

dam · 11th April 2002, 18:58

Good.Since this is your first skin submitted to 1001 it takes a week or two.Once you are accepted your skin is published immediatley like in deviant art.

Also submit at http://www.skinz.org
Will take 24 hrs.

Jellby · 12th April 2002, 09:30

Thank you Dam, the full version is now published there: http://www.skinz.org/skin.phtml?skinid=2539

dam · 12th April 2002, 09:39

Me downloads improved version.Me likes.

Karmacoma · 12th April 2002, 16:57

Since the golden ring in the skin works with the colour scheme, you could consider... a crazy little idea..

not having the ring as the slider, but as the posbar itself, then you could make the slider a gleam running across it.. i don't know if this could look good, but an advantage is that you can shrink the slider vertically by cropping it...

too much to try at this point?

Jellby · 12th April 2002, 17:14

Hey! Good idea! But I don't think it is possible, the slider is an opaque picture, and it would fit the background rings some times but not most of time. If I shrink it, then I may like it to look like a gleam running across the chain, but I'm afraid it would look like a white point/square floating over the chain. Ideally it would be a highlight in a ring that disappears while a hightlight in the next ring appears, but I don't know how to do that (maybe in Winamp3?). But I may be wrong, if any of you know how to do that, please tell me

StillWater · 12th April 2002, 17:15

Quote:

Originally posted by Karmacoma
Since the golden ring in the skin works with the colour scheme, you could consider... a crazy little idea..

not having the ring as the slider, but as the posbar itself, then you could make the slider a gleam running across it.. i don't know if this could look good, but an advantage is that you can shrink the slider vertically by cropping it...

too much to try at this point?

that would look great if you could somehow pull it off

StillWater · 12th April 2002, 17:20

To pull it off, you'd need to change the look of the chains (seen from a different angle perhaps), so that the top part of them was almost a straight line, because the posbar slider is fixed, as you outlined, Jellby. Sounds hard to do.

dam · 12th April 2002, 19:00

Thats a nice idea but youd be very luck if you could pull it off.

Jellby · 13th April 2002, 15:16

Well, I've tried to make an AVS preset for use with my skin (not very amazing, but the colours are the same). Here is it in action, I've added a title in the vis area too.

Jellby · 13th April 2002, 15:18

And here is the preset itself. Please try it and tell me what you think. If I want to include it with the skin, where should I put it? Does it work if I simply add the .avs to the .wsz?

StillWater · 13th April 2002, 15:36

Quote:

Originally posted by Jellby
And here is the preset itself. Please try it and tell me what you think. If I want to include it with the skin, where should I put it? Does it work if I simply add the .avs to the .wsz?

Quite a nice preset, Jellby. The beat detection is quite good, unlike many AVS presets, and the colour and style match the skin beautifully.

The preset won't work unless you extract it from the WSZ into your winamp/plugins/avs folder, or a sub-folder, like winamp/plugins/avs/jellby.

So, you'll need to make a note of it in your skin description and readme.txt so that people know it's there, and so they know how to activate it (ie. explain how to extract it from the WSZ into the AVS folder)

Atmo · 13th April 2002, 18:59

I'd mention it in your submission comments too...as many people dont check the readme.txt...just say theres an avs preset included and to check the readme.txt for more info or something like that.

StillWater · 14th April 2002, 04:47

Quote:

Originally posted by Atmo The Freak
I'd mention it in your submission comments too...as many people dont check the readme.txt...just say theres an avs preset included and to check the readme.txt for more info or something like that.

Yeah, that's what I meant by skin description.

9th April 2002, 21:53	#42
Atmo The Freak (Forum King) Join Date: Feb 2002 Location: Australia Posts: 9,400	309kb is pretty huge...how many components have you skinned??? Ive done skins with everything but micro skinned (main, eq, pl, avs, mb, cursors) and it's been under 200kb... Are there any duplicate files or anything that you've got in there?? :Psykotech:

9th April 2002, 22:05	#44
Atmo The Freak (Forum King) Join Date: Feb 2002 Location: Australia Posts: 9,400	Interesting....my robnation skin is 947kb unzipped...yet only 206kb zipped... What zip program are you using?? :Psykotech:

9th April 2002, 22:20	#46
Atmo The Freak (Forum King) Join Date: Feb 2002 Location: Australia Posts: 9,400	Try submitting it to deviantart....they dont have a file size restriction as far as i know... :Psykotech:

9th April 2002, 22:55	#48
Atmo The Freak (Forum King) Join Date: Feb 2002 Location: Australia Posts: 9,400	Nice....no bugs as far as i can tell :Psykotech:

11th April 2002, 14:02	#50
StillWater Forum King Join Date: Mar 2002 Location: Nov 1978 Posts: 3,880	Jellby, that's really strange that your skin is so big, since the colours don't seem so complicated (unlike eg. a photo/picture skin) I don't know if this'll work well, but it might: If you really want to downsize it, then try converting the BMPs to JPGs, which will simplify the image a bit without losing too much quality. Then convert them back into BMPs - hopefully they'll then compress smaller. Sow a thought, reap an action; sow an action, reap a habit; sow a habit, reap a character; sow a character, reap a destiny. All my skins: @ winamp.com @ 1K1WS @ Deviantart.com My latest Flash Project: BreathingEarth.net

9th April 2002, 21:46	#41
Jellby Major Dude Join Date: Mar 2002 Location: Somewhere under the rainbow Posts: 1,702	The new version is more or less finished, I still want to make something with text.bmp, skin some additional component(s) and, maybe, some avs(wvs) preset (if I find out how), but I think the basic is nearly complete. There is one little problem: it is too big for 1001skins (309 KB, and yes, I tried the 'decreaser' and even more: made all unused areas yellow) and I would like some other people (not me) to test it. Would you mind if I post it here in 3 or 4 different pieces?

9th April 2002, 22:01	#43
Jellby Major Dude Join Date: Mar 2002 Location: Somewhere under the rainbow Posts: 1,702	No, nothing uncommon... I've skinned the standard (with avs and cursors with a little animation, but that's not the problem) and mikro (with the inside of mb). 27 cursors + 5 txt files = 138 KB mikro.bmp + mbinner.bmp =67.3 KB the big files are: eqmain.bmp : 255 KB pledit.bmp : 153 KB the rest are 10-90 KB without eqmain.bmp, the zip is 247 KB

9th April 2002, 22:17	#45
Jellby Major Dude Join Date: Mar 2002 Location: Somewhere under the rainbow Posts: 1,702	Plain winzip, with winace I get the same result (maximum compression, of course). Total size unzipped: 1 294 684 Bytes. With Robnation's compression rate it'd still be 274 KB. I guess it's too colourful, even being all yellow

9th April 2002, 22:46	#47
Jellby Major Dude Join Date: Mar 2002 Location: Somewhere under the rainbow Posts: 1,702	It's there now: http://www.deviantart.com/deviation.php?id=273511 Please download it and bug-test it. Any comments are welcome. Thank you.

10th April 2002, 15:02	#49
Jellby Major Dude Join Date: Mar 2002 Location: Somewhere under the rainbow Posts: 1,702	[advertising]Did you see today's (Apr 9, 2002) Daily Deviation at deviantart.com? Go and check it[/advertising]

11th April 2002, 14:44	#51
Atmo The Freak (Forum King) Join Date: Feb 2002 Location: Australia Posts: 9,400	Converting to .jpg would cause quality loss...300k isnt too bad anyways... However...... Seeing as the main portion of this skin is shades of yellow, i believe that it would be possible to convert each bitmap back to 8 bit (256 color) without any quality loss... Should cut the size in half at least.. :Psykotech:

11th April 2002, 15:06	#52
Jellby Major Dude Join Date: Mar 2002 Location: Somewhere under the rainbow Posts: 1,702	I tried converting eqmain.bmp to 256 colours, but I got ugly artifacts in the titlebar highlight and in the eq-vis area... But I'll keep trying different methods, programs, etc. thank you for your suggestions.

11th April 2002, 15:18	#53
Atmo The Freak (Forum King) Join Date: Feb 2002 Location: Australia Posts: 9,400	Which paint program are you using?? Try an optimised median cut to the nearest color if youre using psp...if you'd like i could do it for you...wouldnt take long. :Psykotech:

11th April 2002, 15:31	#54
Jellby Major Dude Join Date: Mar 2002 Location: Somewhere under the rainbow Posts: 1,702	I used Photoshop6, and tried all dither options, I liked none But it was a rather quick try, as a last resort I can publish a low-quality version in 1001 and tell where to find the good one.

11th April 2002, 15:37	#55
Atmo The Freak (Forum King) Join Date: Feb 2002 Location: Australia Posts: 9,400	Dont use dither...it'll just make it look weird...if photoshop doesnt have a replace color option rather than dither i'll do it in psp... :Psykotech:

11th April 2002, 15:46	#56
Jellby Major Dude Join Date: Mar 2002 Location: Somewhere under the rainbow Posts: 1,702	One of the dither options is 'none' I don't remember the exact names, and even if I did they are not in English (and I'm not at home now), but I tried every palette option, even 'web-colours' (horrible!)

11th April 2002, 15:58	#57
Atmo The Freak (Forum King) Join Date: Feb 2002 Location: Australia Posts: 9,400	Ok...in ps 6: Go to image > Mode > indexed color. Set the pallette to Local (adaptive) Colors to 256 Ditther to none... Should work like that I just tried it myself on one of my skins and couldnt notice the difference between 24 bit and 8 bit images.. :Psykotech:

11th April 2002, 16:04	#58
Jellby Major Dude Join Date: Mar 2002 Location: Somewhere under the rainbow Posts: 1,702	Did you try with mine? If I remember correctly, I tried, and there were visible artifacts.

11th April 2002, 16:13	#59
Spectrus_Wolfus Senior Member Join Date: Mar 2002 Posts: 179	[O/T] looks at atmo speaking of ps 6 lol [O/T]

11th April 2002, 16:26	#60
Atmo The Freak (Forum King) Join Date: Feb 2002 Location: Australia Posts: 9,400	I just tried with yours...just the bigger bitmaps...got it back to 170kb...with no image quality loss...if you pm me with an email adress i'll send it to you. :Psykotech:

11th April 2002, 16:31	#61
Jellby Major Dude Join Date: Mar 2002 Location: Somewhere under the rainbow Posts: 1,702	Thank you, I'll give it another try this evening and tell you.

11th April 2002, 16:36	#62
Atmo The Freak (Forum King) Join Date: Feb 2002 Location: Australia Posts: 9,400	I think you could get it even smaller though...by changing everything back to 256 colors it should be possible to get it back to 130kb or so...considering that you've skinned pretty much everything possible thats not too bad at all.. :Psykotech:

11th April 2002, 18:58	#64
dam Forum King Join Date: Nov 2001 Location: The foot of the bed Posts: 2,536	Good.Since this is your first skin submitted to 1001 it takes a week or two.Once you are accepted your skin is published immediatley like in deviant art. Also submit at http://www.skinz.org Will take 24 hrs. http://dam.deviantart.com/

12th April 2002, 09:30	#65
Jellby Major Dude Join Date: Mar 2002 Location: Somewhere under the rainbow Posts: 1,702	Thank you Dam, the full version is now published there: http://www.skinz.org/skin.phtml?skinid=2539

12th April 2002, 09:39	#66
dam Forum King Join Date: Nov 2001 Location: The foot of the bed Posts: 2,536	Me downloads improved version.Me likes. http://dam.deviantart.com/

12th April 2002, 16:57	#67
Karmacoma Junior Member Join Date: Apr 2002 Location: Canada Posts: 5	A little late but... Since the golden ring in the skin works with the colour scheme, you could consider... a crazy little idea.. not having the ring as the slider, but as the posbar itself, then you could make the slider a gleam running across it.. i don't know if this could look good, but an advantage is that you can shrink the slider vertically by cropping it... too much to try at this point?

12th April 2002, 17:14	#68
Jellby Major Dude Join Date: Mar 2002 Location: Somewhere under the rainbow Posts: 1,702	Hey! Good idea! But I don't think it is possible, the slider is an opaque picture, and it would fit the background rings some times but not most of time. If I shrink it, then I may like it to look like a gleam running across the chain, but I'm afraid it would look like a white point/square floating over the chain. Ideally it would be a highlight in a ring that disappears while a hightlight in the next ring appears, but I don't know how to do that (maybe in Winamp3?). But I may be wrong, if any of you know how to do that, please tell me

12th April 2002, 17:20	#70
StillWater Forum King Join Date: Mar 2002 Location: Nov 1978 Posts: 3,880	To pull it off, you'd need to change the look of the chains (seen from a different angle perhaps), so that the top part of them was almost a straight line, because the posbar slider is fixed, as you outlined, Jellby. Sounds hard to do. Sow a thought, reap an action; sow an action, reap a habit; sow a habit, reap a character; sow a character, reap a destiny. All my skins: @ winamp.com @ 1K1WS @ Deviantart.com My latest Flash Project: BreathingEarth.net

12th April 2002, 19:00	#71
dam Forum King Join Date: Nov 2001 Location: The foot of the bed Posts: 2,536	Thats a nice idea but youd be very luck if you could pull it off. http://dam.deviantart.com/

13th April 2002, 18:59	#75
Atmo The Freak (Forum King) Join Date: Feb 2002 Location: Australia Posts: 9,400	I'd mention it in your submission comments too...as many people dont check the readme.txt...just say theres an avs preset included and to check the readme.txt for more info or something like that. :Psykotech:

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