Skinning Tutorial - Other Parts
Skinning does have some slight exceptions.
PNGs are the most used images, but other ones are important and have a few secrets of their own.
This section will tell you what they are.
Bitmaps: The bitmaps as said before mainly are the system tray images as well as the scrollbars. However, they are a bit more than that, such as that buddy icons and sign in details background. You may have noticed some have a bright kind of pinky purply background. This is important. It is what makes the images transparent and in order to get those images transparent they must be that colour (255,0,255) in RGB format. In addition, one image can make up 8 images, this may seem odd but MSN Messenger slices up the areas, so beware when skinning them because the end result can look odd.
The buddy images: They are also sliced images but in PNG format that make up the buddy images in the contact list. Open them in your image editor and place your new images on top of them, trying to get the size right. Just export and overwrite as normal and the buddy images are done:
String Table: The first section of the string table is the contact card colours. Basically, the contact card is made up of three gradients. If you look at the code, it blends so hex colours (just standard HTML colours like #FFFFFF) go into each other to create a nice effect on the contact card. The first set of gradients being the top bar, the second being the middle and the third being the bottom bar. Skinning the contact cards is simple and once your done just click compile script, wait a few seconds, and restart MSN Messenger.
The colour values are:
Just find those parts of the code (they are in order) and change the values to what you want. Also by editing the foreground="#hex colour" part you change the text colour on the contact card.
Bitmaps: The bitmaps as said before mainly are the system tray images as well as the scrollbars. However, they are a bit more than that, such as that buddy icons and sign in details background. You may have noticed some have a bright kind of pinky purply background. This is important. It is what makes the images transparent and in order to get those images transparent they must be that colour (255,0,255) in RGB format. In addition, one image can make up 8 images, this may seem odd but MSN Messenger slices up the areas, so beware when skinning them because the end result can look odd.
The buddy images: They are also sliced images but in PNG format that make up the buddy images in the contact list. Open them in your image editor and place your new images on top of them, trying to get the size right. Just export and overwrite as normal and the buddy images are done:
String Table: The first section of the string table is the contact card colours. Basically, the contact card is made up of three gradients. If you look at the code, it blends so hex colours (just standard HTML colours like #FFFFFF) go into each other to create a nice effect on the contact card. The first set of gradients being the top bar, the second being the middle and the third being the bottom bar. Skinning the contact cards is simple and once your done just click compile script, wait a few seconds, and restart MSN Messenger.
The colour values are:
background=\"C0D0F0,F8F8F8"\ (Section 1)
background=\"F8F8F8,E2EAF3"\ (Section 2)
background=\"CDD9EE,EEF2F8"\ (Section 3)
background=\"F8F8F8,E2EAF3"\ (Section 2)
background=\"CDD9EE,EEF2F8"\ (Section 3)
Just find those parts of the code (they are in order) and change the values to what you want. Also by editing the foreground="#hex colour" part you change the text colour on the contact card.