I checked the search engine here to find some information on how to create your own skins.
Well i'm not good in design, so what i wanna do is modify existing ones.
My search results are that there is no real HowTo regarding this topic and the only hint that i could find is to use the existing skins as a reference.

And thats where i'm stuck at.
Basically all i wanna do is add some transparency to the close, size,... buttons of the Ferox_3D skin. But no matter what i do the skin will eventuelly not show the buttons as transparent.

The other thing is, how does Ambient know which name the apropriate graphics have in the skin folder?
For example the skin names in Ferox_3D are "WindowTitlebarRActive" and "WindowTitlebarRActiveAlpha".

But there is absolutely no referance to those names wether in the config file of the skin nor elsewhere. So how does Ambient know which file to use?

Now regarding the gadget buttons, keeping the name as it is and just adding alpha channel transparency to the image won't result in a transparent button in the skin. why's that? is this impossible right now in ambient? But making the titlebar of the window transparent is possible though.

I am a bit confused and i hope that someone can help me out with this.

PS: i will of course use the modified skins for personal use only. i won't distribute or upload it anywhere.

[ Edited by Cego 29.12.2014 - 17:23 ]

First of all, Ambient does not have anything to do with skins - this is intuition's job.

As for graphics files, they have fixed names in all skins and aren't therefore referenced anywhere.

To use the alpha images, you have to disable the rounded edges flag in the config file.

What do you mean by 'transparent' button? The alpha channel of the button graphics is used to blend the button over the window border.

I wanna create a button which is transparent, so that you can see the background. Ferox3D is probably the only skin using transparency. The inactive windowtitlebar appears transparent.

So I took the Ferox3D skin, where the flag rounded edges is already disabled but f.e. when i edit the close button graphic and add transparency, it wil still show up as a non transparent button when the skin is loaded.

Quote:

If a program open a window, it must set the tag WA_HasAlpha to TRUE at window creation time
Also it exists a tag named WA_Opacity . Seted with a ULONG value at window creation time
displays the whole window more or less transparent.

So: The Windows must have set this Tags, before you can use the alpha chanal.

You can find this Info in the MorphOS SDK "Includes/intuition/intuition.h"

[ Edited by pegasos-sigi2 29.12.2014 - 21:53 ]

i figured it out. all i had to do is add transparency to "WindowTitlebarR" and not directly to the gadget buttons. And adding "alpha" to the name is necessary too. So it must be called "WindowTitlebarRAlpha"

[ Edited by Cego 29.12.2014 - 21:25 ]

So i sum it up a little. When you want transparent skins you have to do the following:

1. Disabe "window_roundededges" in the SkinConfig file
2. Edit your desired part of the skin with an Image Editing programm and add alpha channel transparency to it
3. Save that file under the same name adding "Alpha" at the end.

That pretty much did the trick.