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Possible to plumb in APNG support for sprites?


Kenjitamura

Question

I was curious if it was in the realm of possibility for the PokeMMO client to support APNG battle sprites for use with mods instead of just GIF?  It would make a tremendous difference in creating sprites for use with the client that would have smooth edges while simultaneously decreasing the size of files for sprites which is always a positive. 

 

For those unaware the problem with the GIF format in this regard is that it only supports 1 bit transparency which means that a pixel can only be either completely transparent or not transparent.  What that means for GIF's being used in PokeMMO is that sprites edges will tend to look blocky and jagged.  Where as APNG would not only allow us to reduce the file size of sprites but it would also let us do some smoothing of the edges on sprites.  This can be achieved because APNG has a better quality compression algorithm and supports 8 bit transparency which means pixels can be varying degrees of transparent which looks better to the human eye.

 

Just throwing that out there because while upscaling back sprites for my own custom mod, using waifu2x, I found that while the PNG's had smooth edges the GIF would inevitably have jagged edges.  I've worked around it to some extent by semi-flattening the image's semi transparent pixels to a shade of gray but that's not an ideal solution.  Mod creators would have a much higher degree of freedom in improving this games graphics if they could use APNG instead of just GIF.

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I'm just a complete idiot skimming through the forums, but this sounds like a sweet suggestion and it doesn't hurt to have sexier-looking sprites so it gets my fishy little Karp seal of approval smh

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1 hour ago, Desu said:

Thanks for the reply!  It seems a bit unfortunate the developers of the library used by the client aren't yet on board with APNG but I hold out hope that will change in the future.  GIF has maintained dominance over animated image formats for a very surprising amount of time but I do think the challengers will knock it down eventually.  Whether the format that succeeds it is APNG or WebP is yet unknown but they are both leagues above GIF so either way it will be a big win for everyone.


As an aside I think I finally found a good color to be used as a halo for the GIF's I've been making.  Now to let my computer run for the next ~13 hours to do the processing on the ~30,000 image files for the game >.<

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