The skin editor’s fifth version boasts an upgraded UI design, supports the new Skin Engine, and provides many new features that facilitate working with skins.

Background

Workspace colors can now have transparency. In this case the skin editor displays a checkered background – as is customary in most graphic editors.

Simpler Navigation

The Object Inspector displayed for a selected element now has tabs that allow you to filter entries by their type – a property / an event.

The Structure view also got an upgrade – a filter search box. To simplify navigation, the new editor enables you to choose highlight colors for entries:

Each skin project stores its own specific highlight settings – thus, different skins have independent highlight color sets.

Script Handlers

We simplified access to script handlers. When you require a hander to create or change something, you no longer need to access the custom provider manager. You can run the script editor right from the Object Inspector:

If an event was not assigned a handler, the editor will prompt you to create a new handler.

Copy / Paste

We redesigned the mechanics of how skin properties and structures use the clipboard when copied and pasted. The engine now keeps track of links between the copied elements and automatically renames pasted elements if the skin already contains elements with these names. When needed, the engine corrects binding links between the elements.

Then we enhanced the “clone” command. It is now based on the new Copy / Paste mechanism. It can clone whole containers together with their child elements. This applies to both background elements and controls.

Copy Special

Along with the “Copy properties” and “Copy structure” commands that you had earlier, we added two more:

The fourth one – “Copy Special” – enables you to specify which property groups to copy to the clipboard, and which ones to ignore.

The “snapshot” feature

Look at the new “snapshot” button with a camera icon. It is at the bottom of the workspace, right next to control buttons.  It captures the window within the editor and saves the screenshot as a PNG file. If the background is transparent, the feature saves the transparency value.

Resource Repository

The resource repository also acquired new features:

The first upgrade involves links. The repository now tracks resource links and automatically highlights unused links in gray. The resource repository can also search for dependencies and replace resources.

Note that the replacement feature does not work with scripts, because they usually do not store resource IDs as whole strings. They usually calculate the IDs on the fly, making them hard to track.

The second upgrade is not as significant. You can choose to hide resources that are references to other resources and do not store data.

Texture Editor

The Texture Editor now offers the following new features:

• Image scaling support
• Ability to change the background color’s transparency
• Ability to copy the frame displayed in the preview area to the clipboard
• The forced PARGB to ARGB image conversion feature. It is useful if you need to import images from third-party graphic editors and are using clipboards that export pixels to PARGB instead of ARGB.
• Ability to import / export all texture resolutions at once.

Custom Provider Editor

The custom provider editor can combine providers in groups. This simplifies navigation if a skin contains a large provider list.

Help

The built-in help system also got an upgrade. Now it contains descriptions for all standard providers and their access points. We’ve also made sure to describe all fields and methods that are accessible to scripts.