Image formats

Atrius, any preference as to PNG vs BMP? Because honestly, I HATE bmps... they're way too huge for what you get. What would be the best format to use when it comes to keeping inserting these into the game in mind?

I wouldn't suggest BMPs because there's no need to use an uncompressed format when there are quite a few good losslessly compressed alternatives.

PNG is a lossless format, but has a couple quirks that can degrade the color quality slightly if you're careless about how you transfer it between people. Using the copy & paste functions to grab them off a website instead of downloading them directly is a good way to lose quality. Although not always, it often has a better compression ratio than GIF. It also allows you to use any number of colors, and has an alpha channel so pixels can be partially transparent instead of all or none (Though that doesn't make a difference for GBA graphics).

GIF doesn't have the quirks PNG does, so it's safe to copy & paste around, except, as is common with any image format, you sometimes lose the transparency doing that. Of course they can be animated, which is always nice, but are limited to a 256 color palette.

Atrius wrote:

GIF doesn't have the quirks PNG does, so it's safe to copy & paste around, except, as is common with any image format, you sometimes lose the transparency doing that. Of course they can be animated, which is always nice, but are limited to a 256 color palette.

I found this out the hard way when making my first emoticons. Now it is really easy, but it has a 5% chance of failing (so I do it again).

Also, I now prefer .gif files when using anything to do with images, but I am afraid that this might not work very well.

Hm, .jpgs are good for insetion into games, right? Perhaps this might have been part of the problem when trying to change the sprites in Zelda: Link to the Past...

Oh well, can we expect more portraits?

Have a nice day.

.jpgs are a horrible format, they won't work well at all in sprite-based games, that's for sure. ESPECIALLY with those that have a restricted palette.

Split the topic because half of it was image format discussion.

Anyway, when someone sends me graphics in .jpg format while I'm programming a video game I just send it right back to them, and tell them to redo it in a better file format. Jpeg is terrible for video game graphics.

I think Jpgs should only be used for traditional art scans (which are usually very big in size so JPGs compromise its quality less) and photos (same as traditional art).

Wait... is it common for people to send sprites/other video game art as Jpgs? Yikes D:

Hm... Wait, I was confusing Jpegs with something else, sorry about that. Was it PNG files?

Have a nice day.

They're ALL my icons. PNG = format of god.

Charon the Ferryman wrote:

Wait... is it common for people to send sprites/other video game art as Jpgs? Yikes D:

Not if they don't enjoy being insulted to their face.

Hehe, lol. By the way, I think that since the images that ZNES takes are JPEGs (I think), converting them to GIFs made them look bad. I say this because, well... See the waterfalls in my signature? That is a good example of what can happen when converting them.

Have a nice day.

Either you set it to use too few colors, or whatever you used to convert it did a bad job with the palette.

I think that it might just be the palette, but it is hard to tell... I have to change it to 256 colours anyway if I want to animate .gifs.

Have a nice day.