[MacGyver]

Does anyone know which is faster, small image enlarged by the skin engine, or a nativley large image?

Also is it faster to code every <control> item, or is the skin faster with common control items called from <includes>? I don't exactly know how the skin is cached so it's hard for me to tell, it's not really a big problem with 720x576, but I may need every bit of it as fast as it can be when I port it over to 1920x1080.

If anyone has any speed tricks, please let me know.
I like to not have to redo everything if possible, but right now 1080 is SSLLOOWW, but it could be just my pc (it can't do 1920x1080) downsizing it to fit.
I don't have a 1080 tv either (hell I don't even have a 720, though it does work with pal if I want to squeeze out a few extra scan lines more)

[CHI3f]

I think the biggest thing speed wise is the image dimesions. Try to make them all in integers of 2-i.e. 1,2,4,8,16,32,64,128,256,512

While you build the xpr you can see how many wasted pixels there are for each image.

There may be other reasons a skin slows down alot but I think that is the #1 cause of it. I may be wrong after all I am pretty new to this stuff, but if I am I am sure someone will correct me and explain it to you better.

[jmarshall]

Correct - scaling textures is no performance hit whatsoever, but the bigger the image, the longer it takes to load (and the more memory it consumes). Any texture with little or no detail should be as small as possible and scaled to suit.

Total number of textures onscreen at once obviously makes a difference though, but xbox hardly breaks a sweat to be honest.

Includes will slow down loading slightly, but I suspect you'd be hardpressed to notice it (it'll only slow down logarithmically with the number of includes), so no worries there).

And yeah, it'll be likely faster on xbox than on your PC. The PC app has a bunch of Sleep()'s in it so that it yields to the operating system anyway.