BlackMesa 2 Reworked

this is a reworked version of 'blackmesa v2' by valkyre.

[link]

i love this visual style, but select few things with it always bothered me and once i decided to actually do something about it, it grew from there and now, it's pretty much a freaking huge bugfix slash optimization job of the theme, with some added touches of mine.

it's very, very optimized, as you can see below, and i've tried to retain as much of the original style as possible while still making it look neat and polished. and i dare say i've succeeded.

i hope you'll enjoy it!
wzd.

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theme fixes applied:
* 'tile' sizingtype is now almost completely obsolete, replaced with 'stretch'. 6 parts still use 'tile'.
* all .bmp's indexed & optimized.
* colored 'startbutton' is back!
* completely reworked start menu in both 'normal' & 'compact'.
* notification area is now 'flat' rather than 'round'.
* optimized end-result .msstyles-file to reduce file size, 'large fonts' & 'extra large fonts' removed.
* removed some excess images completely to reduce file size.
* removed stray colors & shrunk gigantic images.
* resolved 'startbutton' position issues.
* resolved font overlapping issue by setting '$tahoma8$' and '$menufont$' to tahoma, 8.
* reworked & optimized shellstyle.dll color & css entries.
* reworked 'groupbox' part & fixed text being 'cut off'.
* reworked all (!) color entries.
* reworked shellstyle.dll bitmap entries.
* rewrote .theme-file(s) and enabled 'windows classic' hack to enhance performance.
* setting caption buttons 'sizingtype' to 'stretch' instead of 'truesize' fixed some scaling issues.
* some images had transparent parts which were not actually rendered transparent in code.
* theme now uses four different .bmp's for taskbar, looks correct wherever it's positioned.

font requirement reduced to:
* tahoma
* tahoma bold
* verdana
* verdana bold

theme files:

* blackmesa
normal with big logotype wallpaper & enabled 'windows classic' hack.

* blackmesa 2
normal with small logotype wallpaper & enabled 'windows classic' hack.

* blackmesa classic
classic with big logotype wallpaper.

* blackmesa classic 2
classic with small logotype wallpaper.

* blackmesa compact
compact with big logotype wallpaper & enabled 'windows classic' hack.

* blackmesa compact 2
compact with small logotype wallpaper & enabled 'windows classic' hack.

* blackmesa compact heavy
compact with big logotype wallpaper & disabled 'windows classic' hack.

* blackmesa compact heavy 2
compact with small logotype wallpaper & disabled 'windows classic' hack.

* blackmesa heavy
normal with big logotype wallpaper & disabled 'windows classic' hack.

* blackmesa heavy 2
normal with small logotype wallpaper & disabled 'windows classic' hack.

optimization comparison:
* .msstyles & shellstyle.dll, original: 5.27 mb (5,527,552 bytes)
* .msstyles, original: 3.48 mb (3,649,536 bytes)
* shellstyle.dll, original: 917 kb (939,008 bytes)

* .msstyles & shellstyle.dll, modified: 1.78 mb (1,869,312 bytes) (~33.8% of original)
* .msstyles, modified: 968 kb (991,232 bytes) (~27.8% of original)
* shellstyle.dll, modified: 857 kb (878,080 bytes) (~93.5% of original)

disclaimer:
theme wallpaper is a simple 'chaosxp' logotype i created, copyright (c) wzd, 2009 - 2010.
original theme by valkyre on [link] give credit where credit is due!

other material used in theme copyright their respective authors:

gant 2 by ~mattahan
[link]

whack and blite cursor set by ~bouzounours
[link]

installation:
hit the 'win flag' button + r, the 'run' prompt appears: type "%windir%\resources\themes",
without quotation marks, into the 'run' prompt, then you'll be looking at the directory to
which you must copy some files.

copy the contents from the "bin" directory, to your local "%windir%\resources\themes" directory.
naturally, you must have a patched uxtheme.dll to use this theme, as it is not digitally signed:

[link]

when all this is said, and done, you can simply right-click an empty area on your desktop, choose
'properties', and then pick the blackmesa flavor of your choice from the appeared drop-down list.

and with that, i thank you for your interest in blackmesa reworked,
and again thanks to valkyre for making this wonderful visual style.