So that thing I was talking about in my post yesturday night about the previously-unalluded new feature? You may not have immediatly noticed it...and thats its point! The new feature is subtle and there to make tiled backgrounds on zooming docks finally practical. The problem with tiled backgrounds before, was that in most cases you needed really specific icons for them to look proper. Reason being, otherwise if the image was large, all it would do is cover up the background and you wouldn't really even see the tile at all, it'd just look like a big mess. The new ability of v1.9, for tabbed backgrounds you can now set a certain percent that the existing image should be shrunk and shifted.

**First before I start, for a reminder for skinners who may have read in SkinningTheDock file on making tabbed backgrounds...i highly highly highly recommend not using any special stretch/tile-boundries! E.g. leave out any "LeftWidth"/"TopHeight"/etc flags, and always stretch. Tiling/multiple-stretches/etc for tabbed backgrounds will seriously slow the performance of your tabbed background! Ok, now on with it


Consider the following:

[Tile]
Image=MyBackground.png
ResizeIconByPercent = 100;
OffsetIconByPercentX = 50;
OffsetIconByPercentY = 50;

These are the default settings, as if you entered nothing. (Other than the setting for "Image" of course, you have to set that yourself!). It says that the icon should be sized to 100% (dont resize down at all)...and with any difference in space (which there is none)...offset the icon by 50% of that amount both from the left (X) and top (Y)



For several tile skins I included with OD v1.9, I have something like this:

[Tile]
Image=MyBackground.png
ResizeIconByPercent = 80;
OffsetIconByPercentX = 40;
OffsetIconByPercentY = 40;

This tells ObjectDock to resize the icon down to 80% of its original size, and then offset it by 40% of the difference for both X and Y...so basically, just left and just up of it being centered.


Similarly....
[Tile]
Image=MyBackground.png
ResizeIconByPercent = 80;
OffsetIconByPercentX = 50;
OffsetIconByPercentY = 0;

Those lines tell ObjectDock to resize the original icon down to 80% of its original size, then center it horizontally, but don't move it at all vertically...so keep it top-aligned, but smaller and centered. You'll see this one in use in the HyperGrass skin.


For sake of comparison, take a look at these couple of screenshots and guess which one is v1.9 with an updated skin file, and which isn't






Anyways, subtle sure, but does it open things up for some cool stuff like you can see with the 'glass' and 'hyper grass' backgrounds? Definitely. Haven't gotten a chance to update the "skinning the dock" text file, but will be when we get the chance - hopefully this tutorial is enough for people who want to start making their tiled backgrounds rock. Enjoy

-Jeff Bargmann
ObjectDock Lead Developer