The VG Resource

I imagine running a site like this would take up some bandwidth, so I wondered if anyone heard of PNG Gauntlet.

http://pnggauntlet.com/

It's an application that rearranges the way the data is stored to get a smaller file size. It's completely loss-less with the compression, and you can do whole folders at once too. I thought it was my duty to help out by informing of this program.

Please remember to remove the thumbs.db from all your compressed files. They're thumbnails XP makes, and they're pointlessly taking up space. Check the 'show hidden files' thingy in folder settings to reveal them. I can't remember if it was you guys or someone else that did that. So if you already do remove them, sorry about that.

I think that we already had plans for processing future files on the next edition of tSR, so that they're reduced when uploaded to the site.
And for files already on the site, I planned to batch process them myself once the site is launched.

Doorhenge Wrote:It's an application that rearranges the way the data is stored to get a smaller file size.

How does this exactly work? I've heard that some image hosters use a method to compress pictures, which causes a darkening effect on said file.

(02-19-2013, 12:23 PM)Davy Jones Wrote: [ -> ]How does this exactly work?

The PNG file format is horrifically complicated... PNG files use compression, but it depends on how you create the data blocks and chunks to get an optimal size. I don't know how exactly things work, but some PNG libs do their optimization job better than others.
The darkening isn't a result of the optimization and compression, but some other flaws somewhere else in some PNG processing utilities (it may result from pixel format conversions for example).

(02-19-2013, 12:23 PM)Davy Jones Wrote: [ -> ]I've heard that some image hosters use a method to compress pictures, which causes a darkening effect on said file.

As far as I can tell from using my image browser and scrolling back and forth to compare the two, I can see no difference whatsoever.

This app was popular at the Duke3D forums for their texture pack.

I was fearing that a site like this would start to add up in the bandwidth area and have to close down. So that's why I bothered at all.