Topic: Question regarding recent Mother 3 screens

[Tansunn]

Just curious, but was there any reason for changing the format of the screenshots?  I mean, the originals from Itoi's site were about 5k GIF images (except the forest scene, it was about 10k), while the new ones are about twice the size AND have noticable jpeg compression artifacts.  

I don't mean to sound like I'm complaining or anything, it's just something I noticed and it got me curious.  I've taken graphic design classes which have sort of trained me to notice things like this.

[ruby_onix]

It's because of the watermark they added.

Something like GIF or PNG-8 is great for GBA screenshots because they're 8-bit, so they can preserve the color-limited image perfectly, but once you start trying to add extra colors they just start to maul things. And since PGC's watermark is semi-transparent, it adds a lot of new colors.

What PGC could probably do is make GBA pics in PNG-24, and then run them through a PNG compression program, which should give bitmap perfect image quality in the small area around the watermark, and would still have GIF-like data compression over the rest of the image, without the ugly JPEG artifacts.

[Karl Castaneda #2]

Er... what he said.

This is more a question for TYP, I guess, even though I was the one who added the screens. All I know is that there's a magical system that takes the screens from my folder and puts it on site. Further than that, it's a mystery to my lazy ass.

[Pale]

Yeah I mean, even though I'm noob so I never really experienced the old way, with the new way it makes it easier to upload a ton of screens at once.  This should mean more screens in a shorter amount of time for you guys so I think it's a good trade off.

[Karl Castaneda #2]

Pale's lucky he wasn't around during Capcom's Pre-E3 blowout last year. So many screens... Why we needed twenty screens of each game in Mega Man X Collection is beyond me.

[TheYoungerPlumber]

Oh jeez.  Well, it can be done (giving an option of save format) but I'd have to do work from multiple angles.  If we determine this is a serious issue I can provide alternatives.

But, honestly, we've been using (a different form of) this tool for over a YEAR, converting to JPEGs.  I find it odd that this comes up now.  

[Tansunn]

Well, for one thing, I'm a huge Mother fan, so I was naturally drawn to the images, and then I found the same shots at various other sources and noticed they looked a bit cleaner there.  Out of curiosity, I checked the properties for the images here compared to at the other sites and saw that they were in a different format and different size.  And now I know the reason why, thanks.