Optimization - Something that is forgotten?

Is it just me or do many skin designers just not take into account of performance when designing skins?

I have two machines, a fast one and a slow Windows 2000 machine.

Skins just don't run fast on the Windows 2000 machine, until I optimize them that is!

The simple process of reducing the number of colors on the bitmap images to 256 or 16 has a dramatic effect on how fast the machine will run. You can reduce transparency in a lot of images where the background can be part of the image.

99% of skins seem to have all 16 millon colour images, this is just crazy as the reduced color images look just as good as long as you use an optimization tool such as the one in Paintshop Pro.

Sure you could say get rid of the old machine, but I can still tell the speed difference even on the new machine.

So why have lower performance however fast your PC is when the results are just as good?

skinning

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You're absolutely correct, the majority of images used in WB can be reduced to 256 colors without any real loss of detail. TGA images on the other hand, which are used for some transparencies, have to be full color, although most of them are quite small and shouldn't impact performance.

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Perfectly true, and I have to put my hands up and plead guilty - but with mitigating circumstances to be taken into account.

I started off trying to optimise the first skin I made as I went along, but I kept finding bits where things would break when I switched from TGA to BMP, and from 24bit to 8bit etc, and in the end I was fighting enough obstacles to make the skin work at all, let alone running the risk that a well intentioned optimisation would break something which I might not notice. There are so many cases to check with a skin to make sure it operates correctly that once I'm satisfied that a bit "works" then I'm loath to touch it in case I break it.

...take this thread I'm still hoping someone can help me with as an example: https://www.wincustomize.com/msgboard.asp?BID=WCS&id=263931

Suddenly something that was working as stopped through a change made somewhere to improve something else...the same problem happens when optimising graphics to some extent. It introduces the possibility of errors.

Now, what would be really cool would be an option to automate the optimisation process - hint, hint

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I responed in your thread in the general section.

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