Classic Shell: Forum

Questions for the wise ones.
I had these questions floating in my head, time to offload.

1. Can a combination green and red bitmap mask, be selectively turned on and off?
eg. normally red mask enabled, and green mask enabled.
Then with some text symbol in skin file, have red disabled, and green enabled, and vice versa?

2. Can a blue mask be used for anything?
I saw one skin that has mostly high number red mask for system glass color,
a small amount of green mask, to blend in a bit of white/grey of the menu color.
But I also saw a little bit of blue mask?

3. Can a skin file directly communicate an instruction, to use a specific system glass color for a red mask?
To put another way, can skin text overide glass color to make menu that color,
or perhaps even tell Windows system, to make taskbar that color?

4. Is it possible to have an option inside a variation, and to show the option check box, just below that variation,
in the CSM settings skin options window? I have failed to accomplish it.

1. No. You need separate masks

2. No. Blue is not used for anything and is ignored. Same for the alpha channel

3. No. If you don't want your skin to depend on the glass color then clear the mask and use that color. However keep in mind that whatever the final image ends up being, it is still blended with the glass surface, so if you want transparency you can't fully eliminate the glass color. The taskbar cannot be changed from a skin.

4. No. Options are independent of the variations. You can use a radio group to simulate variations, and then you can have some options be conditionally enabled or disabled based on the selection. However even in that case all radio options are next to each other.

Ok, thanks Ivo, for the fast response.

I was hoping there was an easy way, guess I will learn to reduce the bitmap sizes, and make duplicates to use for a "favorite color"

One more question. Is there a maximum size for a skin?

There is no limit for the size of a skin. Of course larger skin files will take longer to download.