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And incompatibilities should be reported, preferably on the AROS bug tracker.

greets,
Staf.

That is not necessary - Decoration needs to be fixed so that it does the conversion when loading the theme (which it doesnt currently).

@Kalamatee
Being on the verge to do some personalised skin theme in wanderer myself i am pretty interested by this so wish to send some suggestions:

Might be a stupid idea but what if the system do a first conversion in raw and a caching of the image themes to speed up things a bit?

second solution:
what about providing a raw converter for theme developers and then use raw images in the themes?
Or maybe a theme compiler to feed with png files to obtain raw format images?
Or, third, provide the option to feed the themes with raw images togther with iff/png format.

If i understood the problem clearly time is lost in converting images from the native format, so being able to read raw format natively should speed things a bit, something like prepare pictures in raw format for games in order to minimise access times on the old amiga hardware...

Saimon69

The way Decoration works is fine - it does not, however, perform its rendering operations in the best manner which severly impacts its performance.

The main problem (as Michal recently pointed out ..) is that it tries to use Images in a particular format rather than using the native format of the gfx hardware it is running on. The result of this is that every rendering operation needs to convert the image from one format to another using the CPU while rendering.

Another problem that needs to be identified and addressed is that resizing windows (possibly only when decoration is running, I havent checked without) causes the borders to be drawn twice, which again has a negative impact on performance. Compair the difference between selecting in inactive window and resizing a window and you will be able to see that this is happening and how it is affecting the windows performance in general.

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Indeed =), decoration is "just a hack" to get skinning into AROS, something better should replace it if you ask me (no dissrespect to those who made it).

Yep, more stability would be nice...

@4play: I removed the decorations from my startup-sequence, and also feel it's more speedy than before. And personally, I like the oldschool look more then the shiny new borders...

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There is also Regina wich is a Rexx scripting language (should be quite compatible to Arexx on Amiga).

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Scroll down to the Recommendations section to see the useful stuff:
http://aros.sourceforge.net/documentation/developers/roadmap.php

I agree with getting bugs fixed. I think IcAROS/VmwAROS offers a good opportunity to offer a fixed environment to do this, as tracking down bugs on constantly changing system (i.e. the nightlies) isn't so easy.

Remind me, which scripting languages do we have on AROS? Python, Lua, any others? Was Perl another (half remember it being available)?

I agree. The best way to see potential new users running away without giving aros a chance is to show them your system (or worse yet theirs) crashing just because you ran two sdl apps, or all these other things. (plugged in a usb device,stack problems and the list goes on)

I really like aros and where its going, but I'd really like to see a "cleanup, bug fix, stability release" in the very near future.

We now have web, ftp, irc, a good painting program, a good tracker, a notepad, and many decent games. I think now is the time to tighten up the codebase and get the bugs resolved before building more apps on top of ones that may already cause problems with the core system.

I'd really like to see a whole new release solely dedicated to fixing crashing problems and bugs, adding speedups and enhancements...then perhaps a whole new release dedicated solely to adding more and better drivers...

Every person helping just does what they want, thats great for many things but I think some direction about aros as a whole is required to better AROS.

Steven

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A lot of AROS ports uses SDL, including all the trackers and 90% of the games. Stability is something we should have had someone working on in the whole of AROS, the OS crashes way too much. Decoration is another thing wich is quite "bloated/buggy", removing it from boot up seems to speed up AROS and stability for me at least, another thing is the stack problem with some apps, like the ones from Jahc (wookie and sabre)... we need some bug hunters .