BuffSkin 

Simple is as simple does. I'd go with "Resize", myself. Since we kinda already know that Buffed deals with buffs and BuffSkin deals with their skins, the relativity factor is really implicit.

But anyway, semantical nitpicks aside...


Whether you're LUA editing or futzing with settings, it's still time spent- the only difference is how you feel most comfortable spending it. And not just for me, but for each and every person who downloads it. I don't mind getting 'under the hood' a bit like this. I don't think you'll find other people quite so patient, however.

Those people will download that skin, say, "it doesn't look like the picture", and then promptly stop using it. Silly perhaps, but this is how people are. Will I mind much? Well no, it won't affect me one lick. But principally speaking I may as well not even put it out there if almost no one will have the patience to use it.

As for my own time, I've spent the better part of the last two days doing what I call "shoehorning" in order to get this to work, and I'd be lying to you if the thought had never occurred to me: "Gee, if only Bison or something very much like it supported either dynamic or rounded buff layouts... then I could just use that and ButtonFacade and it would all work itself out instead of beating my head against a wall..."

...I'd also be lying if I said I wasn't a stubborn jackass capable of amazing feats of reckless repetitiveness.

I see what you're saying, I just still think more people are uncomfortable with the concept of an Addon you have to endlessly fiddle with to get to work right (and what might seem "simple" to you isn't to most people, trust me on this). We could go around about it for hours I suspect. It's a principle thing.


Given how much time I'll be spending reorganizing my interface "blindly" in order to make this look how I'd like it to, I'm going to have to respectfully say I'm not seeing the 'better' in this outcome.

But, again, this is a perceptual thing.

I was about to say that didn't work until I realized there seems to be a lag on the display of settings changes.



That seems to be what I was looking to do- I had to set the offset in the neighborhood of 6 to get that to happen, however, a couple comments:

1) "Offset" honestly wouldn't have been my first thought when looking for an option to resize the skin. To me offset means nudging something to the side or up and down- offset from center, in other words. But there we come back to that language snaggle. To be fair, I did play with it, but that coupled with the lag led me to believe it wasn't the option I was looking for anyway.

2) Since a BuffSkin skin contains only images and no settings, basically anyone who downloaded this, or a skin like it, would have to know the offset setting to get the desired effect, rather than just installing it and having it work out-of-the-box, so to speak. Seems a kinda "ugly hack" if you ask me.... :/

3) Because The Skins have to be larger than the Icons in order for this to work, it seems reasonable to assume I'm probably going to have to reorganize all my Buffs once again to accomodate for any potential overlap. This is going to be really hard to do if I can't see every container with the accommodating skin so I can see what sort of spacing is needed. I guess I could try and do this in a buff-heavy situation, but most raids probably wouldn't appreciate me wasting all their good buffs on futzing with my interface.

Alright. I've started from scratch again, and, for whatever reason, the images now display at least having loaded them in at 128x128.

But, the buffs still aren't round.



And near as I can tell, the reason for this is to do with functions of Buffed! and BuffSkin themselves. Namely the size relationship between the buff and it's skin.

Returning to our diagrams, we can conclude in order for a skin like this to work, the skin image must be somewhat larger than the buff Icons. And near as I can tell, I have no real way to control that relationship between the two.

Because, despite having been able to load in the larger images, near as I can tell, BuffSkin has still sized them to match the buff Icons.

I can resize the buffs of course using Buffed, but BuffSkin just resizes the images along with it. They stay in lock-step and thus the effect I'm trying to achieve never happens.

Nope. But I dearly wish it were something that simple.

Inititally I changed the filenames to match the naming scheme that Buffskin appears to use, that being:

• Buff.tga
• Debuff.tga
• Gloss.tga
• NoGloss.tga
• WepEnch.tga

I did that much because I'm assuming that no matter what skin is being used, this is how the code recognizes what to put where. After that, when I re-sized them I did nothing more than opened each and saved them as is.

It's possible I'm over-thinking this, but when you do something that logically should work and it doesn't, well you don't have too many options other than to try to think of really crazy things that might have gone wrong.

I'll start the process from scratch again, I guess.

Forgive me here, I'm actually a graphics designer by trade. I have no head for code, but I know my way around a lot of image editing programs better then most. So I know there's really only two things you can do here to get the desired effect: either you're layering over it or masking it out.

"Snipping" isn't an option. It's a bit of slang that has no mechanical meaning or practical application to the discipline. And it's kinda confusing to hear it.

But if I understand what you're saying correctly, the skins are just slightly larger than the buffs so that the rounded portions lie over the corner of the buffs, like so:



The overall result would be that you achieve the look of roundness by composite. This would be Layering. However, it presents another problem, and that is...

Neither am I. All I know is, I ported them in at 128x128, and an attempt to load them into BuffSkin literally did nothing. Nothing appeared, nada. When I shrunk them down to 64, all of a sudden, they appeared.

Now, they say insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result, and I may just be that insane, I suppose.

All that's well and fine, but I'm not really sure what I did wrong. Or what you may have changed for that matter.

Although the alpha masks in the image files at least in theory ~should~ mask out a round figure, they don't. I don't feel so much like I used the wrong textures as I'm lacking a texture or interaction that would mask out the icon in the backdrop.

So far the only assumption I have to make is that there isn't any interaction between the skin overlay and the icon behind it deeper than just "covering" it over.


And I still haven't got the faintest idea how you got it to load textures bigger than 64X64. Unless that's something you changed?

That's the general goal.

There's more textures included with ButtonFacade skins than there are with BuffSkin skins, though, and not all of them have a counterpart in BuffSkin. I made a few educated guesses on what was meant to go where.

I suppose I guessed wrong.

Bison's ButtonFacade support applies them capably enough. There are some extra textures in the trinity pack that are obviously meant for action bars, but I gather they're just not used. That said, it should just be a simple matter of matching up the ones that correspond.

I had to shrink the size of the initial textures to even get BuffSkin to read them anyway, as stated. If you got them to read at 128 x 128, I'm at a loss to figure out how. They wouldn't even display for me until I shrunk them to 64.