 April 17, 2008 - 10:22am | I'm guessing "don't use PNG" isn't what you'd consider a helpful response?  If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe. -- Carl Sagan |
 April 17, 2008 - 2:33pm | You are correct since the PNG format is a very standard and good lossless (as opposed to JPG which is lossy) image compression (and PNG stands for Portable Network Graphic, it was kind of intended for putting things on the web). It was designed to replace the GIF format since GIF is a propriatary format owned by Compuserve (whowever owns them now). Ad Astra Per Ardua! My blog - Expanding Frontier Webmaster - The Star Frontiers Network & this site Founding Editor - The Frontier Explorer Magazine Managing Editor - The Star Frontiersman Magazine |
April 17, 2008 - 11:38pm | PNG is often misued, Terl. People mistakenly use it as a replacement for large JPG images, leading to titanically-sized files with only a marginal visual improvement over JPEG/JPG images that use lower compression values. PNG was originally intended to replace small GIF images, usually in black and white such as text and lineart, as you mentioned, but people have latched onto the "lossless" quality and ignored the fact that the format was not designed for its most common use -- horribly bloated, large-dimension full color images. Please consult http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portable_network_graphic#Comparison_with_JPEG for more information. None of this addresses your issue, of course. I haven't seen what you map looks like, so it might be a properly-used PNG -- no condemnation of your format choice, I assure you. What I said before was intended in jest, so I apologize if it didn't come across that way. I sometimes forget that not everyone knows me (and my hatred for misused PNG) as well as my close friends elsewhere on the internet. I'm sure Bill will be able to handle the problem with a bit of time. If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe. -- Carl Sagan |
April 18, 2008 - 6:46am | I knew it was in jest, I just forgot the smiley after the "You are correct" part of my response . I agree with you completely on the use of the two formats. Generally for large images JPG IS better. Normally I try both and use which ever is smaller. In this case the map has small numbers and icons on it that can start to get blurred. Plus there aren't a lot of colors (in fact, if I spent a bit of time on the icons, it could get it down to exactly 4 plus a few for the movement lines, I'm just lazy) and I can convert the image to an index palette instead of RGB which PNG can handle and JPG can't since it always want's RGB.Just some numbers. The best jpg compression I could do without the yuckiness of the smearing begin more than I like was about 85%, even that started to be noticiable (not on the grid numbers but on the icons). That gave me a file size of 1.7 MB. Even at 25% compression which really hacked the icons and started in on the grid numbers I could only get a file that was 798 kB. I converted the map to a 255 bit palette and saved it as PNG and ended up with a 107 kB file, a factor of 16 improvement. If I didn't do to palette converstion the file was 157 kB still about an 11x improvement. So I agree with your observations about the two formats, but in this case PNG is a better format. Plus the upload used to work just fine but something broke. Ad Astra Per Ardua! My blog - Expanding Frontier Webmaster - The Star Frontiers Network & this site Founding Editor - The Frontier Explorer Magazine Managing Editor - The Star Frontiersman Magazine |
 April 18, 2008 - 8:20am | Bill, I looked on the site and viewed multiple PNG's. Some .png work, others do not. AZ_GAMER sent me his .png's via email. I can view them just fine but if they are uploaded to this site somehow they are getting corrupted. (I grabbed the files from /files and saved them on lappy and could not open them with GIMP) -- simply w00t -- |
April 18, 2008 - 10:48am | Somebody who knows how to use PNG properly? I may have a heart attack!  Looking forward to seeing the map, Terl.If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe. -- Carl Sagan |
April 18, 2008 - 11:05am | I used to do it with GIF's now I do it with PNG, same thing. I used to work at a web publishing company back in the early 90's and learned a few tips from the graphics designer there. Back then it was squish it down as small as you possibly can. He rarely if ever sent out a graphic with more than a 50 color palette and they always looked great. You can get the blank hex map (just grid and numbers) in the Second Sathar War downloads section. It's the blank hex grid download (about 80kB) I was a bit rushed so the numbers are not as neatly lined up as I'd like but they work. The one that doesn't work was the battle map from our drammune battle with the planet, station, ships and move lines on it. Ad Astra Per Ardua! My blog - Expanding Frontier Webmaster - The Star Frontiers Network & this site Founding Editor - The Frontier Explorer Magazine Managing Editor - The Star Frontiersman Magazine |
 April 23, 2008 - 10:19pm | The other major advantage of PNG over JPG is that PNG supports transparency which is essential to producing objects that are to be used on or over a background image. It's fairly standard in the world of VTT's to produce most maps as JPG's and most objects/tokens/virtual mini's as PNGs. |
