balala wrote: ↑January 25th, 2021, 7:49 pm
I definitely can't follow: if you hide a skin, it still consumes almost the same resources. The only difference is that is it not shown on the screen, but in background it still runs. The measures do all what they have to do: parse information over internet, make the required caluclations, substitutions, condition evaluations and so on. When using Game mode and even more so when you close Rainmeter, all skins are deactivated (unloaded), so they don't consume any resources in such a case. Not sure how hiding skins could save any resources in front of completely unloading skins / Rainmeter itself.
The Button uses the !ToggleConfig function and the skins definitely reload completely when I click the button a second time, especially seen on my weather skin. Also I measured the FPS and got noticeably better performance with it than without it. It even comes really close to using the Game Mode or shutting Rainmeter off.
So apparently it does turn them off and unloads them. Otherwise I can't really understand the performance gain.
balala wrote: ↑January 25th, 2021, 7:49 pmAn additional disadvantage of the method is that you have to know which skins are loaded and have to be hidden / shown. If you don't cretate a "perfect" list (containing all loaded and not containing unloaded skins) into the LeftMouseUpAction option of the shown [meter] meter (
leftmouseupaction=[!Toggle "Config1"][!Toggle "Config2"]), you either will not be able to hide all skins, or even worse, get error messages in the log.
It isn't soooo hard to create that list honestly. You can just click on the rainmeter app and on Active Skins and you basically get a list of all skins you're using. I even managed to switch skins and I didn't have ANY knowledge before about that at all, apart from a slight bit of guessing what a piece of code does here and there.
If you had read the whole conversation, you'd know that it doesn't use
leftmouseupaction anymore. It just defines the
Meter as a Button and then gives the Button the command of
[!ToggleConfig "SkinPathHere" ".iniFileHere"] [!ToggleConfig ... for every loaded (and unloaded, if you want to toggle some other skins on when it switches) skin. (It basically hides my usual layout and toggles another slow updating and less intensive one now.)
I mean I do understand that it can get quite messy if you have a lot of skins loaded, but it's nothing impossible to do.
For me putting some work into it one time is a lot more worth it, than having to click two times to activate a gamemode and two times to leave it again. And it seems it doesn't do much else than my button does, only that it takes a click less and is at a more convenient position than the Game Mode setting. It even still shows me something if I wanted to see something on my screen, other than forgetting to turn the game mode off again in the end, which already happened to me in testing.
It's basically a good compromise to what I was looking for. Other than the Game Mode setting... Of course it would be better if it was automatic, but that might lead to problems in the end. So that button is good for me and it does work like I want it to and does not show
any other errors than it usually did in the log.