[DELETED]

[LATER BUDDY]

[DELETED]

Edited January 30 by Wolfy

[Sean]

Just remember this is a level headed idea and nothing to hype over, just more of a discussion from everyone. No one is "righted" a new skin or anything. Thanks.

Quoting this for emphasis. I saw some dumb comments in the statuses a while ago where someone was all like "It's been three years, there's no excuse," acting like the admins are lazy about it. Please keep in mind that skins were a nice bonus that the admins put their free time into making for our enjoyment and you are in no way owed any skins.

[Carbo]

New skins also require rewriting a lot of CSS because after an older, minor update a good number of months back a deal of code was rendered obsolete and essentially broke a few board functions that aren't major or that easily notable, but they're still things that need fixing for compatibility. As much as it's easy to believe this is just a matter of switching palettes and banners on image files, it's still not that easy and still has to come after all the functional kinks.

It'll take time either way.

[BakingBluePotatoe]

As long as we get a Tails skin, I'm cool with it. :3

Or Chao would be cool too...

-Day time Sonical, Night time...Werehog..ical? One of the ideas that popped up in the statuses was changing the themes as it hit night time and day time. I've seen MLP Forums do this with their IP board, but I'm not sure if it's a custom deal or not. Again, if that's just a headache waiting to happen, I wouldn't want to stress anyone out.

[Cola]

New skins sounds like a fantastic idea! I'd love to see ones like Two Foxy and Nu Sonical restored.

Especially Nu Sonical.

[Alex2Beta]

That would be lovely!

Now, if there was a Knuckles Skin, I would happily contribute with something sprite based (mind you, original sprites, not ripped).

Oh, and that Were-skin..It would be an amazing idea I think, I'd probably contribute to that too!

[Eternal EX]

Needs more Shadow love.

Anyways I'm cool with a new new skin(s). It would be a nice....."change of pace".

[Wraith]

Big and Tikal need skins. If there was a big skin I would spend all of my time here just staring at it's sexiness.

[Chooch]

Quoting this for emphasis. I saw some dumb comments in the statuses a while ago where someone was all like "It's been three years, there's no excuse," acting like the admins are lazy about it. Please keep in mind that skins were a nice bonus that the admins put their free time into making for our enjoyment and you are in no way owed any skins.

We all need to remember

That nothing in this world comes for free

We have to make it what we want

'Cause you and me and everybody

Work it out, work it out

Think about it

Work it out, work it out

Talk about it

Work it out, work it out

Make it happen

Let's work it out, work it out

We've got to make skins real

We've got to make skins real

We've got to make skins real

We've got to make skins real

Edited October 11, 2012 by Chooch

[Lady Soniko]

why not go for something none sonic, and have it based round it's members and mods? would be cool to have our screen names/avatar things incorporated into a theme

otherwise i'm digging the night & day idea.

just some suggestions~!

[Diz]

Funny thing, I actually thought about skins yesterday. I know they can be time consuming to implement, not to mention how certain versions of forums clash with skins, but I do miss that kind of personalization, so it would be nice to see a few approaches/returns. It can also refreshen the forum experience a bit. ^^

[Wentos]

Quoting this for emphasis. I saw some dumb comments in the statuses a while ago where someone was all like "It's been three years, there's no excuse," acting like the admins are lazy about it. Please keep in mind that skins were a nice bonus that the admins put their free time into making for our enjoyment and you are in no way owed any skins.

I'd like to point out that I responded saying "No I'm not saying it's a right, I'm just curious as to why it hasn't been done," and I'd appreciate you not leave out parts of the story in order to make me look bad.

[bmn]

Right, I like this idea, so let's address stuff.

...they did bring up the idea of it being a group project to create these new skins, or somehow restore the old ones.

I like the idea of a group project. The sad fact is that most of the admin-level staff (i.e. the people that can actually implement skins) are way more busy than they were back when they were doing this stuff themselves.

We've had plans that never came to fruition simply because what free time we did have was spent doing more important things and getting what chillout time we could. If crowd-sourcing development can make it that much easier for us, then I'm all for it.

While that could possibly be fine and dandy, there is also the admin standpoint that we can't forget. I mean I don't know how intensive the coding behind all that can be, or if it truly is a pain in the dick to get a new skin up and running smoothly for everyone. These guys do more than their fair share already and before this should even be an idea (maybe should've made this mention first), it's gotta be cool with bmn, Chris, Roarz, and so forth.

This is the big issue. I envisioned and partly implemented a system after the old skins went out where we have a "parent" skin (in this case, Sonical), and any later skins are "children" that override parts of the parent. In that way, if we wanted, say, a Sonical variant with a different colour body background, that skin would only require one line of code (that background colour override).

In order to make this work... we need to fix Sonical first. Successive board updates since IPB's smarter skin updater was introduced have actually half-fixed the skin from its more broken state a while back, but as we all know, Sonical both isn't finished and isn't without issues where it is.

What we need is people to:

• Find things which are broken, things which don't work the way they do in IP.Board, and style aspects which don't look good due to not actually being complete.
  
• Suggest fixes and styles (people that have ability in CSS, preferably).
  
• Design image-related parts which are missing.
  
• Replace colour-specific imagery (e.g. the chequerboard background image) with alphatransparent images using colour (usually white or black) to manipulate a background colour underneath it.*
  

Once Sonical is in a good state, we can think about other skins.

* If that's a little confusing, and you're versed with layers in Photoshop or whatever, think of it this way: The chequerboard image has four boxes, two the lighter blue, and two the darker. Instead, have a background colour that is the lighter blue, then on a new layer above it create the darker boxes in black, and fade the layer out (bringing the background colour in) until you get the desired shade. Then make the background invisible and save the image as an alphatransparent PNG. On its own, it'll be a transparent image with greyish bits, but put in a skin, we can change the colours just by changing the background colour in CSS.

-Restoring older skins: People would love them back for nostalgia sake, and well, a lot of them were just plain awesome. I know they're buggy and missing features of the newer IP board, but couldn't the "stems" of all of them be released so people could work on them and add the missing bits? I guess this would require a detailed list of all the pieces needed even, if that's how it works.

Yes, but the skins would be new creations rather than restorations. The old skins are essentially beyond repair.

-Day time Sonical, Night time...Werehog..ical? One of the ideas that popped up in the statuses was changing the themes as it hit night time and day time. I've seen MLP Forums do this with their IP board, but I'm not sure if it's a custom deal or not. Again, if that's just a headache waiting to happen, I wouldn't want to stress anyone out.

This, as far as I know, is both possible and not particularly difficult.

why not go for something none sonic, and have it based round it's members and mods? would be cool to have our screen names/avatar things incorporated into a theme

This is an interesting little idea, one perhaps worth developing.

Big and Tikal need skins. If there was a big skin I would spend all of my time here just staring at it's sexiness.

Yes.

Needs more Shadow love.

No.

We all need to remember

That nothing in this world comes for free

We have to make it what we want

'Cause you and me and everybody

Work it out, work it out

Think about it

Work it out, work it out

Talk about it

Work it out, work it out

Make it happen

Let's work it out, work it out

We've got to make skins real

We've got to make skins real

We've got to make skins real

We've got to make skins real

Yes.

[Ferno]

Oh cool, it's nice to see that the discussion that spawned from the statuses last night spawned a whole thread. If this were to actually happen, I'd love to help out in any way possible.

As a refresher to newer members, these were the skins we've had in the past:

Sonical, Two Foxy, Knucklehead, Creamed, Catfish, All of Angst, Kinetic Psycho, Dundee, SoSuper, Sonic X-mas & Oil 'n Rum.

As this was quite alot, I guess if we're really gonna do this we should probably carefully pick and choose what we really want back first and go from there rather than trying to get them all back at once, or even at all, or, if we prefer, we could just do different and new themes altogether. My own ideas were sorta branched off of Wolfy's Werehog idea. Maybe a "Classic Sonic" light blue skin, and a Wisp Skin that featured a variety of colors. (yet still pleasing to the eye of course.)

Edited October 12, 2012 by The Rotary Rotom

[Frogging101]

I love the current skin. I'm not saying that new skins are a bad idea, just giving praise on Sonical.

EDIT: Oh and I also love the banner images. They're very endearing and awesome.

Edited October 12, 2012 by Frogging101

[Abominal SnowTaz]

I love the current skin. I'm not saying that new skins are a bad idea, just giving praise on Sonical.

EDIT: Oh and I also love the banner images. They're very endearing and awesome.

It gets awesomer, you can actually submit banner designs. In fact, Christmas is around the corner so banner designing is a possibility right now.

[Frogging101]

It gets awesomer, you can actually submit banner designs. In fact, Christmas is around the corner so banner designing is a possibility right now.

I hope we don't lose/replace any of the current banner images (Cuz they're good, I really like the "Love Sonic? Love TSS!" thing).

[Abominal SnowTaz]

I hope we don't lose/replace any of the current banner images (Cuz they're good, I really like the "Love Sonic? Love TSS!" thing).

Well, some may replaced to put up new ones. I don't know if the banners can be re-useable or not once they've been up already.

[Wentos]

So, it seems a new theme (Knucklehead) has shown up on the board. It seems to be a work-in-progress, but I'm pretty sketchy on the details. Someone care to fill me in?

[Blue Wisp]

So, it seems a new theme (Knucklehead) has shown up on the board. It seems to be a work-in-progress, but I'm pretty sketchy on the details. Someone care to fill me in?

Short version: bmn is designing the Knucklehead skin, but he wanted the skin to be available only for staff members until it was finished if I remember well but as we can see the skin is unfinished and is for public use.

[Tornado]

I don't want to be that guy, but...

I really like the Knucklehead theme from what I've seen so far, but would it be possible to make a version that takes up more of the page like the default theme does? Because the really constrained proportions is why I switched away from Sonical.

Edited November 2, 2012 by Tornado

[Jack / Joker]

So the Knuckles skin comes first? That's prioritizing I can live with! >=D

Edited November 2, 2012 by Princess Peach!

[Tori Himemiya]

I like the return of the Knucklehead skin but...

The blue really doesn't go well with the red. D:

[Blue Wisp]

I like the return of the Knucklehead skin but...

The blue really doesn't go well with the red. D:

[Chris]

As a refresher to newer members, these were the skins we've had in the past:

Sonical, Two Foxy, Knucklehead, Creamed, Catfish, All of Angst, Kinetic Psycho, Dundee, SoSuper, Sonic X-mas & Oil 'n Rum.

Maybe a "Classic Sonic" light blue skin, and a Wisp Skin that featured a variety of colors. (yet still pleasing to the eye of course.)

There was actually a theme centered around Super Monkey Ball as well which had a colour scheme very similar to what you're suggesting for a "Classic Sonic" one. That skin, however, was created to add some flavour to our skin selection at the time by adding an alternative to simply Sonic the Hedgehog related skins (and keep you guys on your toes!).

Those that liked it, really liked it. Those that didn't.. well, yeah.