8.4 Beta - PackInfo Reorganisation

[Programmer]

Have you ever set up a deck with a background and colour scheme that looked really right? Sometimes I have felt I have achieved this, and I have thought it would be really great to be able to share the deck with other users, complete with the background image and other settings. Well, now this is possible...

The first thing is that if a deck contains a background image called "bkg" (.bmp, .jpg, .png etc) this will get loaded by default when the deck is first opened. The PackInfo file now contains all the settings for the deck, including colour, image position (centered, tiled etc) and so on, so you really can specify any settings.

Of course, when you give the deck to somebody else, they don't have to keep your preferences, but that is how the deck will appear until they establish their own settings.

So, all settings have been transferred from DeckCollection.xml (which is no longer used in version 8.4) to the PackInfo files. The program transfers all these settings automatically the first time it runs and finds a DeckCollection.xml file present. Then when it finishes the transfer it renames it to "Old_DeckCollectionData.xml", for back-up purposes and to prevent it happening more than once.

I say "PackInfo files" because there are now two of them: PackInfo.xml and PersonalPackInfo.xml. The reasoning behind this is that there are two settings which the user might not want to share when they exchange a deck. These are Background and Cursor. These both say something about how the user organises their files (e.g. that they might have a directory called "My Images/Gay Porn/Bondage" or whatever, and they might not want other users to know that). So therefore these two settings are stored in the PersonalPackInfo file which is never passed on. This doesn't matter though, now that the background image can be passed on simply by including it with the deck as a "bkg" file.

For the sake of completeness, animated cursor files are treated in exactly the same way. If you include a "def.ani" or "def.cur" file in your deck, this will be loaded along with the other settings the first time the deck is used.