Well, as you know Jafo, I was a BIG Litestep fan for about 2 years, but with the advent of OTS, and the demise of Litestep.net, I just gave it up and moved on to DesktopX.
I thought the new standard was a pain in the butt, as I had got used to doing things a certain way,(theme switching etc.) and I just couldn't be bothered starting all over again, and anyway, I had been lured away by objects and zoomers and such. I must say though, I DO miss Litestep.net, I used to love trawling through the themes, they were so inspirational to me, and shaped alot of what I do now.
Is LS.net EVER coming back?

I don't distribute, so I use the Open crae Standard, which means you toss everything in the step.rc.

moshi...it just so happens it was one of yours that gave me a problem...'Audiophile'.....but I added a few others, namely 'Sage' by Phar0e...[he'd included the OTS docs so I wasn't running quite as blind - relying on intuition and a lot of experience....thanks, Phil]....and 10 hours of solid work later, and I've 'almost' got my system ported to OTS....
Just to put it in perspective....I had a trifling 5 simple themes...[one of them was mine running 'clean']...but have now added the 'JafoSTEP Integrated' [as I call it]...which currently stands at 4,401 files, and 378,713,127 bytes....comprising 1 primary theme with 9 different popups and configs, 3 colours, and 13 more interlinked themes...all res independent, all auto loading walls for each res....the simplest has no bmp's, the most complex has 1,605 bmp's....
This, on top of updating from the 20020213 Dev build to the 20020530 Indie build, and converting the Directory structure to OTS.....it ain't a small job....mainly because there are so many limitations if you adhere strictly to the 'method', and I've gotta rig up a lot of work-arounds...
The trick, of course is that I'm running all this stuff from C:\Lite-new\....and not touching my original setup which is just a 'Kill LS - ShellON - Load LS' away....

craeonics notes: Jafo lives and thrives on randomly dumping the magnitude of his home brew

moshi....yes, I know, but it had the same [almost] directory structure, one I'd never directly bothered with, that is with the non-core modules in a separate Folder...so I was 'hoping' [silly me] that it would port over to OTS without much ado.
It just became another learning-curve, as was my separate theme....once I got them ticking over, it was a good lead-in to porting the 'biggie'...

moshi...it'd have to be a CD-distro...
I'm still trying to get around having a popup.rc in the /personal/ and not have it show in certain themes that it doesn't 'suit', eg...my Commodore 64 one...

Just yet another failing of OTS....

Coming in late on this one. Too bad cause its one of my favorite topics.

OTS is a little tricky to convert to, but only in terms of the personal.rc's, etc. The basic directory structure is pretty universal (thats a dangerous term in the Litestep world, I guess).

I definetly have adopted OTS as the standard I use, but with the new indie build theme switcher, you aren't restricted to OTS (which is good). I haven't downloaded many others' themes, but a couple of recent ones I have are by jcg and teschio. I can say that those 3 or 4 themes did drop in practically error free.

So I hope that's a sign of good things to come.

jafo: just comment this line:

include "$PersonalDir$personal.rc"

and use the following:

include "$PersonalDir$hotkey.rc"
include "$PersonalDir$evars.rc"

*Desktop RButton !popup
jdeskmbutton2 [!none;!none;!popup;!none]
jdeskdoubleclicktime 1

now you can define the popup menu in your theme´s step.rc

With the added rc files for the OTS system, I'm still down to 67 rc files....so it's getting 'simpler'....just came up with the idea of a 'includes.rc' file to make it a bit more 'logical'...

you could use one rc file where you define a value for PopupMenuStyle (or whatever you like it to call). then use conditional statements. you can then change the value for PopupMenuStyle with textedit2.dll.

feline concludes Jafo really really likes gray

all this talk of rc files is putting me in mind of my lovely .vimrc file. people always seem to panic when they see it. its only 30 times bigger than average

Speaking of .png, oh mighty 'Steppian Hierophants, how different does LiteStep handle those? Does it use .png's internal alpha channel for real, 256-level transparency or is it still plain old don't-draw-ff00ff and only different file-extensions?