Not enough unique tags for pre-loading images.

[Reece]

      I have been making a theme, and have come across a roadblock. This particular theme requires quite a few bit map images. So I have to make allot of pre-loads. I found out that I can only use numbers 0-9, and (capital) letters a-z. I originally thought this wouldn't be a problem, because I thought I could use multiple digit numbers. But I can only use single characters. Is there something I don't know? Or is there only a limited number of tags I can use?

[[Saint]]

This post puts me in a difficult situation.

I do not want to name names, or point fingers, and I am at least partly responsible for this as I sat and watched it happen...but, here goes...generally speaking, the skin engine documentation is rubbish.

Parts are missing. Parts are incomplete. Parts are blatantly incorrect.

Between CustomWPS (which certain people are adamant I leave intact), and the user manuals, there isn't a single complete source of documentation. This is highly regrettable. I blame myself for this for knowing this was the case but never being able to find the time to rectify it.

My desire is to get rid of CustomWPS completely, and have the one source of documentation be the user manual.

However...this rant doesn't answer your question, does it?

What you want is the new style of identifier calls (the style you're using was only kept in place to avoid breaking compatibility with older themes. The new style is as follows:

Code: [Select]

%xl(identifier, image_name.bmp, X, Y, N)
%xd(identifier, N)

There's two main points of interest here:

- "identifier" needn't be a single character, you can use a descriptive string like "my_cool_identifier_name_here".
-  the image display call no longer needs to use characters AaZz for the subimage count. This has been replaced with a number.

So, what does this mean?

Primarily, there are no more arbitrary restrictions on identifiers or the subimage count. Identifiers can be as long as you want them to be, and images can contain as many subimages as you need them to. Secdondarily, its easier for someone else picking up your code to read at a glance.

Apologies for the slight rant, I hope this addresses your issue, I cannot promise that I will be able to do anything about it in a timely fashion but I can promise I will try.


[Saint]