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Image file formats (full version)

BlitzPlus Forums/BlitzPlus Programming/Image file formats (full version)

Tomas Khan(Posted 2009) [#1]
I was just looking in one of my folders and realized that PNGs are really, really tiny compared to bitmaps. The demo version of BlitzPlus only supported bitmaps, so I use only bitmaps in my games right now.

I have two questions: 1) What file formats are supported by the full version of BlitzPlus? 2) Is there any reason I might want to use bitmaps over a smaller file format that works? (I've read that GIFs only support 256 colors, so I'm leaning away from them.)

Thank you!
Tomas Khan


Sauer(Posted 2009) [#2]
Bitmaps have the best quality, that's something.

And B+ supports PNG's, BMP's, PNG's according to the manual.


Tomas Khan(Posted 2009) [#3]
Bitmaps have the best quality, that's something.

Well, I just thought of looking on Wikipedia, and I found this, which says
Some image processing programs have PNG compression problems, mainly related to lack of full implementation of the PNG compressor library. These include Microsoft's Paint for Windows XP.

Which, I'm pretty sure, is what I'm using. Do you know what "PNG compression problems" Paint has?


Sauer(Posted 2009) [#4]
No, but you could download another paint program, or use SumoPaint just so you don't have to deal with it.

Or just suck it up and use .bmp or .jpg.


Tomas Khan(Posted 2009) [#5]
Well, I haven't seen any actual quality issues, so I guess I'll try going with PNG. Thank you!


Gabriel(Posted 2009) [#6]
Bitmaps have the best quality, that's something.

No they don't. They have the same quality as PNG. PNG's compression (DEFLATE) is lossless, and they support 24 bit color.


Tomas Khan(Posted 2009) [#7]
Thank you! I've already started the conversion, and the PNGs have all been working fine, so over time I'll get them all converted. (Of course, that's easier said than done, as I have a lot of images. I'll just see how many I don't need.) Thank you!


Gabriel(Posted 2009) [#8]
I use XnView to perform batch conversions, if that's any help. Unlike a lot of similar tools, it tends not to need handholding when converting images with an alpha channel, although since you're using BlitzPlus, I imagine this might not be an issue for you.