APNG is dumb

[TTEchidna]

Gif is and never will be a logically better option - it provides seven thousand times more incentive for dumbass users to steal them and upload them from Serebii and Pokébeach - not that Pokébeach didn't already jack our apngs of Latios and Latias - it's a crappy filetype invented in the days when your website was supposed to consist of stupid arrows and midi background music, annoying looping backgrounds, and plain links.

If we move to gif for our animations again, then nothing but static sprites are going into the spritebox. Even for Crystal and Emerald. Why? because then the sizes of the sprites would at least be freaking consistent. No more 47x32 sprites.

The sprites are not animated in the games as gifs. This is absolutely not the case for the E/DPPt/HGSS sprites, and heavily likely not the case for BW sprites. Crystal's debatable because it's not like it needs to show seven million colors on the GBC anyway.

So no. Gifs are not adequate. Rip the sprite of Rayquaza from DPPt. Save it as gif, save it as png. Tell me every single pixel on it is the exact same color - all 1600 of them.

 

[Noivern]

Gif is and never will be a logically better option - it provides seven thousand times more incentive for dumbass users to steal them and upload them from Serebii and Pokébeach - not that Pokébeach didn't already jack our apngs of Latios and Latias - it's a crappy filetype invented in the days when your website was supposed to consist of stupid arrows and midi background music, annoying looping backgrounds, and plain links.

If we move to gif for our animations again, then nothing but static sprites are going into the spritebox. Even for Crystal and Emerald. Why? because then the sizes of the sprites would at least be freaking consistent. No more 47x32 sprites.

The sprites are not animated in the games as gifs. This is absolutely not the case for the E/DPPt/HGSS sprites, and heavily likely not the case for BW sprites. Crystal's debatable because it's not like it needs to show seven million colors on the GBC anyway.

So no. Gifs are not adequate. Rip the sprite of Rayquaza from DPPt. Save it as gif, save it as png. Tell me every single pixel on it is the exact same color - all 1600 of them.

Just because they are not GIFs in the games doesn't mean that converting them into GIFs is of no use.

Honestly, I don't know whatever format they are using. That doesn't matter, though.

Not when the colour palette of each Pokémon sprite tops out at 15+transparency per frame. (As Eevee said, GIF is 256 colours PER FRAME - more than required for ingame sprites, 4 or 8bit.)

Ever heard of indexed colour? That's what the sprites are using - either 4-bit (16/15+trans) or 8-bit (256/255+trans), depending on the image. Pokémon battle sprites are 4-bit indexed. That's how they are getting away with so many images in the game - uncompressed 4bit is way, way smaller than uncompressed 16/24/32bit. Add compression on top of that, and there'd be great space savings.

In indexed colour images, there's a palette for the image. Each colour in the palette can be arbitary. I can just set the colour of each colour entry individually, or let the computer do it. If there's enough colours to reproduce the image accurately, no more colours are needed.

As long as APNG isn't standard and supported in every browser, GIF will stay.

Oh, and tell me the difference between these without checking the file format. (Ignore the extra spacing, if it exists)

 

[APNG_Fan]

If we go back and gif-up all this crap, or change it into the totally-unsupported mng, then any progress will have been lost. If you wanna force something to become standard, you gotta use it. We use it. Thus it will become standard. Soon enough.

That sounds good in theory, but in practice people migrate into something new and advanced only if new system is backwards compatible with their old stuff.

 

[TTEchidna]

Just because they are not GIFs in the games doesn't mean that converting them into GIFs is of no use.

Honestly, I don't know whatever format they are using. That doesn't matter, though.

Not when the colour palette of each Pokémon sprite tops out at 15+transparency per frame. (As Eevee said, GIF is 256 colours PER FRAME - more than required for ingame sprites, 4 or 8bit.)

Ever heard of indexed colour? That's what the sprites are using - either 4-bit (16/15+trans) or 8-bit (256/255+trans), depending on the image. Pokémon battle sprites are 4-bit indexed. That's how they are getting away with so many images in the game - uncompressed 4bit is way, way smaller than uncompressed 16/24/32bit. Add compression on top of that, and there'd be great space savings.

In indexed colour images, there's a palette for the image. Each colour in the palette can be arbitary. I can just set the colour of each colour entry individually, or let the computer do it. If there's enough colours to reproduce the image accurately, no more colours are needed.

As long as APNG isn't standard and supported in every browser, GIF will stay.

[bp=Bulbapedia:Sandbox#Sprites]Go on. Tell me they look awesome when resized.[/bp] GIF CANNOT HANDLE MULTIPLE TRANSPARENCY LEVELS. It's why it's a shitty format! It doesn't resize well! I'd rather not have to take any risk with a gif file not accurately being able to replicate the sprite's true colors.

That sounds good in theory, but in practice people migrate into something new and advanced only if new system is backwards compatible with their old stuff.

Nothing's stopping anyone from upgrading to Firefox or Opera or anything else that supports apng. Last I checked websites are fricking backwards compatible. Doesn't mean we gotta make them FORWARDS compatible, or else we'd have no transparent pngs because IE6, still a majorly-used browser, can't display the transparency! Hell, we couldn't do CSS because some doofuses who don't update their computers since 1995 are still browsing with IE2 or Netscape Navigator!

When you don't see apng, you are missing next to nothing per page. It's most used on the pages of plot-specific Pokémon and their owners, in the Trainer's Pokémon template and the infobox for them. And it's just the 32x32 menusprite! It's not like a lack of apng support is making you unable to see it. You can see it. It just doesn't move! But who cares! It doesn't need to.

As for the sprites used on Trainer pages and such, most of them we don't even have animated for DPPt, let alone HGSS or BW! And there's nothing detracting from things if they aren't animated. Pikachu's Gen V sprite is 21 kilobytes. Oh. Boy. Considering harddrives are in the terabytes now for regular old computers... why the heck does size matter? In loading the images? There's a reason they're at the bottom of the page. Besides, most of the time, pages are bigger than that, so unless you advocate cutting the size of our episode and movie pages to one-sentence summaries to save space, yeah. No using bytesize as an argument.

 

[Noivern]

There WILL be quality loss when shrinking images down. On GIFs, the quality becomes worse than the PNG. Also, tell me why the APNG isn't animated. However, I don't think we shrink sprites like that on pages for the Pokémon itself.

I think there's an advantage of GIFs when shrunk compared to APNG - GIFs still animate!

Your CSS argument is invalid. Why? Just about nobody is using these massively outdated browsers. CSS is supported by just about every browser. But not APNG. And APNG isn't a real standard, by the way.

I do not recommend cutting out text. Also, the images are small enough as is. I still think APNG is indeed dumb when we can, and should use GIF.

Dial-up? DSi?

 

[TTEchidna]

I use my DSi. Most of the issue comes with how long the damn learnlists are, not the sprites. And the DSi can see them animate anyway.

And "just about nobody"? IE6 is used by 20% of the web-browsing population.

 

[Noivern]

I use my DSi. Most of the issue comes with how long the damn learnlists are, not the sprites. And the DSi can see them animate anyway.

And "just about nobody"? IE6 is used by 20% of the web-browsing population.

Nevermind about the DSi. Have you checked whether the whole file is loaded with unsupported browsers, or only the static frame? That, I'd like to know.

The real problem is that all versions of IE, and if I'm right, Chrome don't support APNG. Despite Firefox and Opera supporting it. We can't just shove other browsers onto their faces, right? When a superior-to-IE browser doesn't support APNGs, well... you know the rest.

 

[Jello]

Well to be honest here, I was being lazy and I just converted the .gifs into apngs, so obviously there is no difference. If someone would like to actually save the frames in the .png format be my guest, but yeah. I like apng and all but the support for it is kinda iffy.

 

[Zekurom]

I think there's an advantage of GIFs when shrunk compared to APNG - GIFs still animate!

Problem with that is that the animation looks really crappy when the pixels don't resize correctly.

 

[APNG_Fan]

Could someone show me a resizing comparison between GIF and APNG?
I don't understand how it could be different...

 

[immewnity]

Could someone show me a resizing comparison between GIF and APNG?
I don't understand how it could be different...

It's actually a problem with the MediaWiki resizing tool, ImageMagick.

 

[APNG_Fan]

I always thougth that ImageMagick is very powerful, so it should be possible to tweak the resizing methods.

I also thought that ImageMagick doesn't work with APNG...

 

[TTEchidna]

It only displays the first frame if it's resized in any way. If it's just the plain size, it's normal. It's fine. Like I said, it doesn't need to be moving; the fact that we have pngs that do move is just a bonus for browsers that can show them. Same with roundycorners. Unless you guys wanna complain about how I make everything roundy now.

 

[Noivern]

It only displays the first frame if it's resized in any way. If it's just the plain size, it's normal. It's fine. Like I said, it doesn't need to be moving; the fact that we have pngs that do move is just a bonus for browsers that can show them. Same with roundycorners. Unless you guys wanna complain about how I make everything roundy now.

Roundy is one thing. APNG is another. APNG being unsupported can be worked around by using GIFs instead.

 

[TTEchidna]

So can roundycorners, with images.

 

[SnorlaxMonster]

So can roundycorners, with images.

Do we have roundy corners detection? I know we have APNG detection, but I didn't know it worked for roundycorners.

 

[The dark lord trombonator]

Do we have roundy corners detection? I know we have APNG detection, but I didn't know it worked for roundycorners.

Use Safari and get rid of everything that's still square?

 

[Zekurom]

Use Safari and get rid of everything that's still square?

Or Netscape 4, for that matter.

 

[SnorlaxMonster]

Use Safari and get rid of everything that's still square?

That doesn't count. Above, there is a link to the use of detection on whether the browser supports APNG, if it does it displays an APNG, if not a GIF.

 

[Noivern]

That doesn't count. Above, there is a link to the use of detection on whether the browser supports APNG, if it does it displays an APNG, if not a GIF.

It might be better to just load GIFs for sprites as APNG does not offer any significant benefits for them. As for move animations, serve according to browser unless opt-out. OK?