The Official Alienware AlienMorph

By The Skins Factory
in Tips, Tweaks & Customization

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Grand Master

Bearded Kirklander

Posted
Posted
Do NOT port this to a "standard theme". It is WindowBlinds and it's staying WindowBlinds.

Why not let people make MS Styles out of it too? What's the big deal? A lot of people think WindowBlinds is lame compared to Style XP or the UXTHEME.DLL hack. What up with your harsh stance on this? :huh:

Grand Master

Frogboy Administrators

Posted
  • Administrators
Posted
Why not let people make MS Styles out of it too? What's the big deal? A lot of people think WindowBlinds is lame compared to Style XP or the UXTHEME.DLL hack. What up with your harsh stance on this?

I'm not speaking for Alienware or TSF on this but let me give you some reasons:

1) Because Alienware is an legitimate company. MSStyles, like it or not, are quasi-warez (they're all a derivative of the Luna.msstyle which in itself is a Microsoft system DLL renamed).

2) Because you wouldn't be able to reproduce it exactly as an MSStyle and that would violate the artistic integrity of the work.

3) Because once it's out as an MSStyle, who knows where else it might get ported to and pretty soon you have a bunch of half-assed ports floating around.

4) It would be tantamount to a company condoning patching uxtheme.dll which is definitely a legal gray area. If you want to patch your system DLLs on your own computer, that's one thing but don't expect legitimate companies to start condoning it. Not to mention the inevitable support as people whose systems break every time the XP build number changes contacting Alienware for support because it's "their" skin.

And as for people who think WB is "lame" maybe those people need to actually TRY WindowBlinds instead. Anyone claiming WB is a "Resource hog" or whatever is just plain wrong. This has been demonstrated over and over again. If 2 megabytes of ram is a big deal to you, then you should stop using msstyles because they use around 5 megs (as one of those svchost.exe files).

MSStyles is not a "standard".

If you want to talk standard visual style then let's talk WindowBlinds whose format is used by Microsoft, nVidia, ATI, Nintendo, and dozens of other companies. Or the format that is used by more people: WindowBlinds. Or the format that works on Windows 98, ME, 2000, and XP and eventually Longhorn.

And moderator hat on:

Reminder: This is the WindowBlinds forum. Think how obnoxious it would be if WindowBlinds users jumped into the "Completed visual styles" forum and started demanding WindowBlinds ports / ragging on msstyles each and every time?

Community Regular

The Skins Factory

Posted
  • Author
Posted

Actually Frogboy hit it on the head - we don't want unauthorized ports, we don't want to use an illegitimate format/platform and we do have agreements in place by all companies involved to deal with certain formats only - formats we feel can best suit our artwork and their brand.

Most people don't know this but it took us about 6 full weeks to do all this work for both sets - AlienMorph & ALXMorph and there is no way i'm going to let some lazy artist take our work and throw it up all jacked up looking just so they get get some props for the sake of getting props.

Right now the Rainlendar port is the only authorized port out of our work. I've been getting email after email from skin authors showing me ports of our art that doesn't represent the work properly. That's great and i'm glad artists want to bring our work into some of the non-competing formats of our GUI Kit, but know that i have set of standards that i adhere to. It goes for my artists and artists that want to port our work. There is a reason why i have 10-14 different artists but yet you can always tell a Skins Factory release... Why do you think that is? Because i'm super picky and super strict with what i'll let carry The Skins Factory name on it :-)

Grand Master

AgEnTsMiTh

Posted
Posted
Actually Frogboy hit it on the head - we don't want unauthorized ports, we don't want to use an illegitimate format/platform and we do have agreements in place by all companies involved to deal with certain formats only - formats we feel can best suit our artwork and their brand.

Most people don't know this but it took us about 6 full weeks to do all this work for both sets - AlienMorph & ALXMorph and there is no way i'm going to let some lazy artist take our work and throw it up all jacked up looking just so they get get some props for the sake of getting props.

Right now the Rainlendar port is the only authorized port out of our work. I've been getting email after email from skin authors showing me ports of our art that doesn't represent the work properly. That's great and i'm glad artists want to bring our work into some of the non-competing formats of our GUI Kit, but know that i have set of standards that i adhere to. It goes for my artists and artists that want to port our work. There is a reason why i have 10-14 different artists but yet you can always tell a Skins Factory release... Why do you think that is? Because i'm super picky and super strict with what i'll let carry The Skins Factory name on it :-)

(Y) great post, you too frogboy.

I agree 100%

Thanks for all the hard work

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