[Hitcher]

added: <backgroundcolor> tag to windows, allowing skinners to specify whether the window needs clearing prior to rendering, and if so which colour to use. Defaults to clearing to black. Set to 0 (or 0x00000000) to have no clearing at all (more efficient on slower GPUs such as tegra2) if you don't need it, or any other (info)color you wish.

I'm guessing this means I can do away with Alaska's white background texture and use this instead but is it more efficient?

[jmarshall]

If and only if said white texture is _exactly_ one colour.

If it's not exactly one colour then it offers no real benefit to you. It's primarily designed as an optimisation technique - if you never have anything blended against the black background (eg confluence almost always uses a backdrop image) then you don't need any background - you can instead just render on top of whatever was there previously. This prevents a clear operation, which on something like tegra2 at 1080p is 20% of the GPU's bandwidth.

Simple rule:

1. If you always have the screen covered up with opaque textures, set <backgroundcolor>0</backgroundcolor>
2. If you do have transparent textures, but they're over the top of a predominant solid color that's not black, use <backgroundcolor>white</backgroundcolor>.

You may in fact be able to do some funky effects with some moving transparent images using <backgroundcolor>0 as well :p

Cheers,
Jonathan