Just some things I'm noticing. Skin's great, I'm just picky.

1. If you ever have an alpha channel fading to completely transparent (there's a lot) make sure you leave at least a 1 pixel wide line of complete transparency along the edge. The way most image editors resize/displaying stuff on an edge gives the illusion of a straight edge, when it shouldn't be. Virtually every image has this right now.
2. spinner-background.png needs to have the gradient dithered. You might as well make it 1024x692 as well, as that's the real width of the screen (the template isn't really 100% correct). The gray line on the top looks bad and should just be black.
3. spinner-circle.png is still not centered. Make the actual spinner 664x664 and leave a 1 pixel wide box around it to make it 666x666. The left and bottom edges have a 6 pixel black area, but the top and right edges have a 7 pixel black area.
4. spinner-clear.png - completely optional, but it's not imperative that all the images be the same dimension as the template skin. If they are smaller, that's fine. If they are bigger, it might be a problem. This particular one has a lot of transparent space which has to be displayed. Cropping it out cuts down on the size and the processing time.
5. sliderpoint10 and sliderpoint30 - make the black pixels gray. They are very jagged when black.
6. star2.png and any other invisible items - you may as well make them 1 pixel and transparent. If you want a 68 byte invisible png, take it out of my blythe map, or compress it yourself.
7. score-x.png - you need the score period, comma, x, and percent for score items. It's not necessary for default unless you are going to use the default as your score numbers.
8. ranking-x.png - all of the SS ones are lighter than their counterparts, and thus hard to see, not that it's necessary to know you have an SS when you can see you have 100% accuracy.
9. playfield.png - not that anyone ever sees this, but it is colorized based on the map background color, so it's supposed to be grayscale. However, the different colors make more distinct shades of blue/green/red or whatever the colors are so maybe it's fine the way it is.
   menu-button-background.png - shouldn't this be a circle, not an oval?
10. spinnerspin.png - Shouldn't this be flipped? AFAIK most people spin counter-clockwise, and the spinner circle looks like it was meant to spin counter clockwise. You can also crop out the left and right portions as they are not used.

Finally, if you care at all about compression and download speed (I certainly do) you can compress all your pngs down to a very small size using pngslim or just one or two of the programs included in the zip. When you reduce every image by 20-95% of their original size, that sort of compression really adds up.

this skin rocks.
end of story.

ziin, I'll do the best I can, but I don't have any fancy and costy graphic editors and am not a graphic designer in profession so when I hear terms like alpha channel transparency and dithered gradients, I basically have no idea what you're talking about. I did some things though...

I balanced the spinner finally. If it's not balanced still, there's not much I can do else.
I also resized images that needed resizing... I'll try compressing the pngs.
For the spinner arrows, there have been a reversed version in the optional graphics ever since I used the arrows in the spinner.

I did not update the .zip yet though...I'll run that png compressor overnight for it to work (as I see it takes much time to compress).

I also have no idea how to remove jagers and turning pixels grey to black and all that... plus I don't redeem necessary to do such elite graphical changes at the moment... There might be some time where I'm ulterly bored or very motivate that I'll put my mind to it. Just not now.

Ahaha, sorry neither am I. I just know these things from gimp.


dithering is when you mix in different colors to trick your eyes into thinking a gradient is smooth, rather than each horizontal or vertical line being exactly the same color. Since you just recolored the original, what you can do if you want is select the gradient at the bottom and do a gaussian blur (filters - blur - gaussian blur).


Alpha channel is transparency. You can double check your transparency by using the fuzzy select tool and set it all the way to 0 threshold (so you only get stuff that is all 1 color, in this case transparent). See how the selection leaves at least 1 pixel of complete transparency all the way around?

To get rid of the jaggies, you can just blur it, or use a select by color and paint in a gray color.

And yes, pngslim takes a LONG time to work, but when it cuts off 5 MB off of SB heavy maps like miracle hinacle and don't stop me now, it's worth it.

I bow for you, Matt. This skin is far superior to anything I have tried so far. Damn man. <3

Star!
oh wait...
+1 support!
oh wait

ANYWAYS, I PRAISE YOU

I must say, this is a very nice skin bud. I've been using the Xiao skin (personally modified though) for as long as I can remember because like your skin, it was all about ENHANCING your performance...making everything easier to see and making it easier on the eyes. Until now, I have used nothing else but my modified Xiao style skin, thanks for making such a clean and sharp looking skin. I really wish more people would make skins like these Keep working on it, it's turning out great, definitely one of my favorites I can honestly say.

Oh Wow, your comments are so uplifting, I'm impressed of the impact and interest this skin has... I really appreciate all your positive and encouraging comments Xact and Danzai. You're the reason why I want to improve and make the best out of this skin by constantly improving it and make it cleaner and better with each release. Expect some more work on this . ~

And also MANY MANY MANY thanks to ziin for pushing me to make my skin looks as perfect as possible with all his graphic help.

Next updates will be about graphics compression (making it easier for computers to process graphics), image croping removing useless space, and correcting that damn wobbly spinner that I can't get perfect grrr...

Then I will plan a cleaner interface, a new health bar, and maybe some CTB skinning for the next release . Stay tuned !!!

MathiasXII wrote:

Oh Wow, your comments are so uplifting, I'm impressed of the impact and interest this skin has... I really appreciate all your positive and encouraging comments Xact and Danzai. You're the reason why I want to improve and make the best out of this skin by constantly improving it and make it cleaner and better with each release. Expect some more work on this . ~

And also MANY MANY MANY thanks to ziin for pushing me to make my skin looks as perfect as possible with all his graphic help.

Next updates will be about graphics compression (making it easier for computers to process graphics), image croping removing useless space, and correcting that damn wobbly spinner that I can't get perfect grrr...

Then I will plan a cleaner interface, a new health bar, and maybe some CTB skinning for the next release . Stay tuned !!!

Looking forward to it as well. It has been my favorite skin for a while now and definitely glad to know you are polishing it to the next level.

A minor suggestion though:
Can you turn up the transparency of the slider? there are times (rare through) when there are notes hidden behind the slider and it's not standing out really much to my eyes.

----- wrote:

A minor suggestion though:
Can you turn up the transparency of the slider? there are times (rare through) when there are notes hidden behind the slider and it's not standing out really much to my eyes.

Hehe glad my skin makes you happy .

Alright as for the slider matter, as much as I would want to be able to customize it to my own liking, customizing that slider isn't possible... You can chose between different presets...

How it works :

In the skin configuration file (skin.ini) inside the skin folder, there's this line :

SliderStyle : [1-3]

You can chose between 3 sliders and I think it has something to do with how. Here's what each look like

SliderStyle : 1 | Default. Layered and transparency between the layers.



SliderStyle : 2 | Plain with transparency



SliderStyle : 3 | Plain, low res color with transparency



So yeah...that's the variety of sliders I can chose from . Not much eh ? I think they are ordered from the slider which uses the more computer ressources to the one which uses less.

Edit: UPDATES ! MUCH MORE COMPRESSED PNGs (easing the processing of those images) and more centered spinner (might wanna check ziin).

MathiasXII wrote:

Hehe glad my skin makes you happy .

Alright as for the slider matter, as much as I would want to be able to customize it to my own liking, customizing that slider isn't possible... You can chose between different presets...

How it works :

In the skin configuration file (skin.ini) inside the skin folder, there's this line :

SliderStyle : [1-3]

You can chose between 3 sliders and I think it has something to do with how. Here's what each look like

SliderStyle : 1 | Default. Layered and transparency between the layers.



SliderStyle : 2 | Plain with transparency



SliderStyle : 3 | Plain, low res color with transparency



So yeah...that's the variety of sliders I can chose from .

Not much eh ? I think they are ordered from the slider which uses the more computer ressources to the one which uses less.

So, you can't change the slider body, but there's already 3 styles of slider body built-in you can choose from the game?
I have absolute no idea about this before... will try it later, thanks for telling me

MathiasXII wrote:

and more centered spinner (might wanna check ziin).

The center circle is 41x41, which gives wobble. Needs to be an even number (666x666 is even)
The second blue outer circle isn't a good circle; it gets thinner near the 45 degree angles, but is the full 634x634 along the horizontal and vertical, just not the diagonal.

Also, approachcircle and sliderfollowcircle need to be redone to get rid of the straight line on the edge.

spinner-approachcircle's inner section is pretty jagged. I hope you saved a backup copy of it too, gimp can't edit 16 bit pngs and support is pretty low among other editors, though not so much viewers.

A quick way to test to see if you've already compressed an image is stick it in a rar or 7z file and look to see the difference between compressed size and actual size. If the archive is compressing it more than 100 bytes, it's probably not compressed at all. The ki-danger images aren't right now. Or just do it all again, since the randomized huffman trials can cut a few more bytes off with each run.

hi i just saw your skin was used in a beatmap now what a nice success congrats and keep working on it

ziin wrote:

MathiasXII wrote:

and more centered spinner (might wanna check ziin).

The center circle is 41x41, which gives wobble. Needs to be an even number (666x666 is even)
The second blue outer circle isn't a good circle; it gets thinner near the 45 degree angles, but is the full 634x634 along the horizontal and vertical, just not the diagonal.

Also, approachcircle and sliderfollowcircle need to be redone to get rid of the straight line on the edge.

spinner-approachcircle's inner section is pretty jagged. I hope you saved a backup copy of it too, gimp can't edit 16 bit pngs and support is pretty low among other editors, though not so much viewers.

A quick way to test to see if you've already compressed an image is stick it in a rar or 7z file and look to see the difference between compressed size and actual size. If the archive is compressing it more than 100 bytes, it's probably not compressed at all. The ki-danger images aren't right now. Or just do it all again, since the randomized huffman trials can cut a few more bytes off with each run.

Okay now, my spinner should not be wobbly at all ANYMORE !!! I tested it in every possible way. It may look wobbly but that's because of the color gradient. I'm kinda deceived it lost a little of it's depth and beauty in general, but the center and all circles are now perfectly balanced.

I reduced the alpha of approah circle and sliderfollowcircle so there's no appearant edges anymore (last layer being transparent).

I also removed the jagged line in the spinner-approachcircle by doing a smiple quality radial blur.

Every image has been compressed I believe now.

Will update everything after image compression is done.

Don't hesitate to point out further adjustments if needed .

Hanyuu wrote:

hi i just saw your skin was used in a beatmap now what a nice success congrats and keep working on it

Thanks ! Will continue to work on it till I feel it's complete then try to submit it to the skin compendium :3 !

Alright, since this skin has known much improvements, I raised the version to 1.1.

Enjoy .

Added change log to the first post and updated screenshots.

Alright so before submitting this skin to the skin compendium, I need to make a new lifebar... I just have no idea of a good concept of a lifebar.

So ANY !!! Help would be very appreciated .

Nice work fixing those approach circles, just noticed you made an update Looks nice and sharp now. The only other thing I would say is make the 300 and 100 hits a little different, its hard to tell if I'm getting 300's or 100's, but the 50's are fine. I kinda use the 300's and 100's as reference if im going too fast or too slow, etc so having hard time distinguishing if im getting 300's or 100's messes with my accuracy XD

Guess who's back, back again
ziin is back, tell a friend

>selection-mod-autoplay.pdn
what's this?
>scorebar stuff:
Keep it simple and small. Many people disable this. I also happen to like your blue-green theme. Why not stick to it? I actually replaced spinner-meter.png with a blue-green gradient as well. I suppose you want the contrast there, but IMO that's why you outline everything.
This is what I whipped up in a few minutes:
colour clicky
bg clicky
>sliderfollowcircle.png and approachcircle.png
still have the lines on the edges since you don't have a completely transparent border
>selection mods
I have a hard time telling what's what. Perhaps with use, it will be easier, but just putting "No Video", "Auto", and "Spun Out" in actual words would help me tremendously. You did a good job with relax in that way.

Some ideas for the selection mods:
Easy - Easy button from staples
No fail - I like the star, though using the actual star from mario brothers would be nice, and of course, say "no fail" at the top.
Half time - good, though I'd prefer ".5x"
Hard Rock - use a guitar
sudden death - good
Double time - good, though I'd prefer "2x"
hidden - good
flashlight - I don't get it. A battery and a sun? just a side view of a flashlight would be fine.
no video - good
relax - good, though I'd prefer a stick figure lounging, or a recliner of some sort.
Auto pilot - how about an airplane?
spun out - okay
Auto - okay, or the "no video" without the cancel icon over it.

about slider border:
most custom maps which have custom skins do not force the white border, so when you play them, it defaults to the dark border from your skin which doesn't match the actual skin. Considering this is a skin, anyone can change the settings any way they please, so it doesn't matter much. It's just something to think about. I don't think the white slider border looks bad on your skin, since the overlay has white on it.

ziin wrote:

Guess who's back, back again
ziin is back, tell a friend Yayyy ^^ *hops around, purrs, giggles, and run in circles at the same time*

>selection-mod-autoplay.pdn
what's this?oops...removed!!
>scorebar stuff:
Keep it simple and small. Many people disable this. I also happen to like your blue-green theme. Why not stick to it? I actually replaced spinner-meter.png with a blue-green gradient as well. I suppose you want the contrast there, but IMO that's why you outline everything. Yeah I tried placing a gradient of about the same color as the spinner around it, and I didn't think it was really neat as there's too much of the same color on the screen. :S
This is what I whipped up in a few minutes: I'll use this material with a personal touch if you don't mind =).
colour clicky I want the colors between Section Fail and Section Pass to be clearly visible at all times. So I'll probably use a color gradient that divides better in the middle OR 4 solid color for each section.
bg clicky Perfect ! I Will draw grey lines in there. They make the division in health bar neater.
>sliderfollowcircle.png and approachcircle.png
still have the lines on the edges since you don't have a completely transparent border. ARGH !!! Now checked the contour with the color pick tool (never thought of that before) and it shows alpha = 0 and colors = 0 everywhere around.
>selection mods
I have a hard time telling what's what. Perhaps with use, it will be easier, but just putting "No Video", "Auto", and "Spun Out" in actual words would help me tremendously. You did a good job with relax in that way. Yeah I'll have to work on that... but a description hilight when you slide your mouse over a mod. So I didn't deem necessary to actually put words on pictures. I thought it was easy to figure out XD.

Some ideas for the selection mods: Will consider these when I rework my mod buttons.
Easy - Easy button from staples
No fail - I like the star, though using the actual star from mario brothers would be nice, and of course, say "no fail" at the top.
Half time - good, though I'd prefer ".5x"
Hard Rock - use a guitar
sudden death - good
Double time - good, though I'd prefer "2x"
hidden - good
flashlight - I don't get it. A battery and a sun? just a side view of a flashlight would be fine.
no video - good
relax - good, though I'd prefer a stick figure lounging, or a recliner of some sort.
Auto pilot - how about an airplane?
spun out - okay
Auto - okay, or the "no video" without the cancel icon over it.

about slider border:
most custom maps which have custom skins do not force the white border, so when you play them, it defaults to the dark border from your skin which doesn't match the actual skin. Considering this is a skin, anyone can change the settings any way they please, so it doesn't matter much. It's just something to think about. I don't think the white slider border looks bad on your skin, since the overlay has white on it. Hmm... you're right! Changed back to white

Once again, very valuable help. Thanks ziin

Woah, this skin's thread was on the 4th page of threads. I'm glad to see the community actively working on skins =).

Updated to 1.11. Most noticeable updates (although not really THAT noticeable) :

- Polished some graphics (the jaggery line inside the hitcircleoverlay and the exclamation mark for danger)
- Tweaked the life bar...although it's not really what I wanted lol, will re-tweak for 1.2 release.

Updated first post!!!

I would also have a request...

If someone is good at glossing graphics, I'd like to gloss (Attachment). The whole skin is kinda well rounded up and 3d-ish, but this looks a little flat. I don't have the eye for that kind of job. I bet anyone can do better than me on this.

Thank you!

you may need to redo the rankings. That oval was bugging me.

Also, I don't really like the cyan. Doesn't let the bump map show up well when it's colored red or orange.



I fucked up the bottom right corner too, but it's not much different from how you had it.

Here we go.

Well this is pretty much it... The final update to my skin.

As I consider it PERFECT to my liking, I will make no further changes to this skin, since as the date between the last update and this one suggest (with the fery few changes that have been made), it's getting nowhere farther...

Actually there's one change that could occur which is the spinner circle that's wobbling SLIGHTLY, but the fix is hard to do so if anyone can help me fix it, I would be THRILLED. Still if I update my skin, it will still be called 1.2.

I'd like to thank Ziin who's been supporting me A WHOLE M*F*LOT in this project with all his graphical knowledge and also anyone else who liked this skin and uses it. I'm glad I could do something that you also like . I'm also thrilled to have done a skin like this! I didn't know I was capable of making such awesomeness lol.

Lots of <3.

Will try to add this to the Skin Compendium