Hey, to anyone using this skin religiously please try this texture/background package and let me know what you think. Went through and adjusted all of the textures (reduced the size by almost 5mb), and compressed the backgrounds in an effort to produce a little more ram. Ultimately I'd like to go through the three older skins in svn and do the same with each of them (messed around with confluence and squeezed a little more ram out of that already). This seemed like a good place to start, so nothing set in stone just a starting point to work from. I'm pretty sure some of the images might be a little "lean" but I don't use this skin so it's hard for me to tell which of them look bad/good/so-so Please try it out (and give feedback) and I'll dial it in from there. As it is now with the changes, home screen boots up to almost 39mb free ram (480p) and sys-info shows 40/41mb free...
Right on, thanks for the quick response. I would like to get as much feedback as possible (from as many users as possible), and eventually commit to source with BuZz's permission. I recall several others being somewhat vocal about liking this skin, so it wouldn't be fair to push something without ironing out "less than adequate" work. Kind of a fine line between making textures too grimy or crushing them too much just to gain a few mb of ram...on the other hand making it so it's very difficult to tell the diff and gaining a decent amount of ram at the same time is a bonus and that's pretty much the goal. Haven't looked at the code too much, but getting rid of the animation includes could make it a little snappier as well (plus maybe add a little more ram). Anyway give it a little time and report back when you've got a minute and let me know some more...thanks.
The home background images were 200+ kb. pngs (shrunk those down to about 30% (that instantly bumped the ram), left the gifs alone, ran the remaining pngs through tinypng online, and then ran everything through pngoutwin which eliminates unecessary chunks/blocks. The category window backgrounds were 400+ kb jpgs...crushed them down to 60kb and 70% of the res
Last edited by byron on Tue Dec 03, 2013 2:36 am, edited 1 time in total.
if you are just talking about using higher jpeg compression on backgrounds, but not changing the dimensions, it should have little effect on memory usage. the images are loaded, depacked to ARGB buffer and then copied to a texture. using higher compression on disk, will just make them look worse. It's possible that removing gunk from pngs could allow the texture packer to work better - but I would want to see before and after packing logs etc before committing anything.
loading a 60kb jpeg is quicker than loading a 400kb jpeg of course, but I wouldn't want to include overly compressed jpegs for the sake of a slightly loading / decompression speed up. resizing texture (which means lower quality of course) has the biggest effect on memory usage, as less memory is needed to hold the texture.
okay, logs from xpr xpress? Like I said, changed the res on the category window bg's (video,music,system,etc..) to 70% of original res, but the other bg's are the carbon fiber looking ones that take up the whole screen (there are 3 of them), and those are pngs, and those were reduced by 70%.
I am not keen on reducing resolution on background images - you say 70% (but the other bg's are the carbon fiber looking ones that take up the whole screen (there are 3 of them), and those are pngs, and those were reduced by 70%.) you mean filesize by 70% or dimensions by 70% ?
I need specifics of exactly what you have changed to what etc. or at least a few examples. Maybe post some screenshots ? (in 720p please as it is a HD skin).
Right...so the carbon fiber BG (original) is 1280x720 @ 998kb and what I did to change it was res only...384x216 @ 70.2kb (this image is gradient so it's iffy to tell the difference...but maybe 30% of original is too small)
CarbonFiberBxG_384x216.png (70.3 KiB) Viewed 5513 times
I would upload the original for comparison, but it's 1mb
5mb of ram gained...but like I stated in OP, still needs to get dialed in If you don't want to add this it's understood and I can just post links here on the forum for this skin, confluence, and pm3 with lighter textures and more available ram...
I have a buddy that religiously uses PM3.HD, I'll get him hooked up with it sometime this week and I'm sure he will be pleased. He tends to fly through the menus too fast, before RAM settles, so he will be a great tester.
I was thinking of taking on this project myself with the skins, just to see what happens. I always designed pages and was a huge compression/png/pageload time facist. Instead, I'll give you feedback.
I have 10 boxes in my livingroom being [waiting to be] inventoried and cleaned. So I'll throw this in my XBMC skins nomad files and move it onto anything I finish setting up of the 10.
Thanks byron, like your work.
EDIT:
By the way of flightweight themes - can either byron or BuZz speak to extending games fanart, box art, or any other gaming/emulation related projects? There are skin mods, scripts, and obviously the scripts modules associated with this stuff and it would be nice to hear a best approach to bringing these features to our Xbox-specific skins provided by SVN.
Perhaps we can spend back the freeram onto the optional support of game art and library type features. It has a certain draw to it, to think all the provided skins would be able to support nifty features like game art out of the box. The next logical solution would be just to provide a "GOTY" expansion pack for the 4 SVN skins.
I'm so obsessed with making things more ram efficient that it's really pretty pathetic. This seemed like a logical place to start since only a couple of images were really eating up the ram for this particular skin. In line with what BuZz was suggesting I uploaded a new xpr to the download link on OP with the less watered down carbon fiber images, so the results are way better looks with a slight loss in performance from the original. Any feedback is awesome so that I can tweak and get started on making it into a theme. Took a second to figure out, but with visible conditioning "Skin.HasTheme(foo.xpr)" and minimal editing to the pm3.hd 720p code it should also be easy to get the skin to switch back and forth from the jpg backgrounds with the theme change too (those save 2-3 mb ram). It's a thin line though, making the program work faster vs. making something look like garbage which is why feedback would be nice. I've got a lot of stuff going on right now, but I've always got time to mess with x4x might just take a little longer to get this wrapped up than I originally thought.
As for the fanart, box art, etc for games start a new thread in this section and layout exactly what you're wanting to do or thinking about and at that point we can explore the options. Thanks for the kind words btw
Please try it out (and give feedback) and I'll dial it in from there. As it is now with the changes, home screen boots up to almost 39mb free ram (480p) and sys-info shows 40/41mb free...
If you don't want to add this it's understood and I can just post links here on the forum for this skin, confluence, and pm3 with lighter textures and more available ram...