[SergeNL]

The problem and the solution:

During skin design, the skin may look good in Skinmaker, but can be very different and messy in BSPlayer.
This is an issue with the Transparency Color in Any-Shape-skins, and may happen, when you edit and save Main.bmp.
This can be very annoying, because the fix is very hard to find. But the solution is easy:

In Windows Explorer, go to the skin-folder, and delete rgn.dat
If the problem occurs with the Full Screen skin, delete rgnfs.dat.
Reload the skin in BSP’s skin-list (in the settings window), and all should be fine.

Why does it happen?

If it is a Any-Shape skin, BS Player picks the color of the top-left pixel in Main.bmp as the color that will be transparent in the control window. All area’s with that color will be invisible.
But BSP also stores the information of that transparent color in rgn.dat, the first time it loads the skin. Next time BSP starts, it reads rgn.dat, and will load the skin faster.
If rgn.dat doesn’t exist, BSP automatically creates a rgn.dat in the skin folder, when the skin is loaded.

But if you edit Main.bmp after rgn.dat is created, and the color of the top-left pixel has changed (or perhaps even the image size), rgn.dat doesn’t know that, and BSP will still load the old information.
Skinmaker doesn’t have the problem: if you load Skin.ini, it immediately recognises the color of the pixel of the renewed Main.bmp. But BSP does not.

Note on BSZ-files.

If you already transformed your skin to the solid BSZ-format, there may be some problems.
You can NOT delete an existing rgn.dat within a BSZ-file. (perhaps you can rename it to *.ZIP, and delete it with a zip-tool.)
And BSP does NOT create a rgn.dat within a BSZ-file, if there is none.

I assume that everyone during the design process will still be working in Folder-mode, but I may be wrong. Some may save directly to BSZ-format, and test from there. If there is an issue, you can do this:

Rename *.BSZ to *.ZIP. Extract the files in the Zip to a subfolder in the skin-folder. Delete rgn.dat, if it is there. Start BSP, or open the Preferences window again. Load the skin once. Check in Windows Explorer: rgn.dat will be created. Select all files in that subfolder, and create a new Zip-file from them. Rename the Zip-file to the original name, and change the extension from Zip to BSZ again. Copy the BSZ-file to the BSP skin-folder. (Not in a subfolder of that). In BSP, renew the Preferences Window. Load the skin. It should be OK now..


Thanks Peter, for going back to even 2005 to find more info… :-) Nothing wrong with your memory. :-) I hope I’ve summarised it all well now. And a little thing: normally I would start with a normal human reply to you.. But for new readers it’s best, to have the issue itself up front. And yes, I do act as a specialist, while in fact I am a newbe. I hope you don’t mind. For new readers, this is more clear. And I am a writer, and you may have your hands full already. I hope to contribute this way. Skin creation is a lot of fun, and should be supported and promoted.