Another couple of nice changes have hit SVN for you skinners.  There’s been a bug fixed in the large texture manager (that handles background loading of images) – it used to wait up to a second between loading images, which meant you couldn’t really use them in situations where you needed a lot of textures loaded all at once.  This has been remedied.

I’ve also added an attribute background=”true” to all texture related tags.  This forces the image to be loaded via the large texture manager except for textures in Textures.xpr.

Jezz_X also suggested a slight tweak to info images with <fadetime> set.  Now, if the first texture to load in a window is already in memory (due to being used in a previous window) it will load instantly, and thus forgo the usual fade in.

All these changes mean:

• You can use the background texture loader for images within containers – this means your wall thumbs can be loaded in the background, giving silky smooth scrolling, at the expense of a slight delay in loading the image (you can mask this by using a loading image for instance).
• You can use the background texture loader for background images that persist across window transitions – there’s no fade in due to the new window being opened.

With judicious use of background=”true” you can have texture-rich skins whilst still having nice, smooth scrolling.