radestock

This morning when I was messing with the sections.xml and there were quite a few occasions where I changed some xml and it didn't quite do what I thought it would. Because it was the sections.xml file I was changing, on occasions where it went wrong I lost the ability to go to 'confirm' in the options screen to reload the skin. This meant quite a few annoying restarts of the game to reload the skin.

I thought the answer might be a 'skinner panel'. In it's simplest form it would be a small moveable floating panel with a 'reload skin' button - so no matter what the skinner does to the rest of the skin they will always have a reload button so they can fix things and reload without having to quit and restart FM. Actually even a keyboard shortcut to reload the skin would be really useful.

It would be great use in the above situations (which I'm sure every skinner has had) but just as useful for skinning in general, saving a few precious seconds.

With the implementation of the excellent 'always reload skin' command line option I thought this would be a good step further.

michaeltmurrayuk

A reload skin keyboard shortcut would be best (A link on a menu may cause people to click on it by accident and get annoyed, also whilst skinning you could have lost the menu), it would also save having to go into the preferences menu each time.

More Keyboard shortcuts in general would be nice.

radestock

That was the point. For when you break something in skinning and can't reload. This panel would be there.

The skinner panel wouldn't be in any of the normal menus. It would be a floating panel you could move like a dialog box. It would be enabled with a tick box in preferences - much like unique id's.

I realised a keyboard shortcut would be better halfway through posting but though I'd include both ideas.

Ricey

Fantastic idea Rad, like you I've had the same problems and this is a good solution to it.