Dark Bit Factory & Gravity
ARCHIVE => Archive => GFX & sound => Topic started by: Shockwave on August 15, 2006
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This is a really old picture I drew in 1989 on the Amiga for a demo that I was working on which never got released.
Yes, I used to do graphics once upon a time before I was a coder :)
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(32 colours btw)
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Coool Mate :)
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Yeah, I remember really liking this logo when I did it.
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really cool for 32 colors shockwave.
i wish i had an artistic flare unfortunitly its code only for me.
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Thanks Nino. Graphics take up a helluva lot of time though.
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This is a very cool logo indeed. I've seen lots of logos in intros but the quality always annoys me (the compression used screws it up). 33kb is too large for a 64k intro so I wondered how I might compress this logo.
The first image is resized and then cut to 16 colours (4 bits per pixel, 2 pixels per byte). Its cut at the edges. Its a PNG like the original. Ignoring the cleaning up it requires (edge pixels), it has most of the characteristics of the original but has lost some of the nice circles in the background. Its 3040 bytes, so less than 3k. Score!
MOst people use jpeg in their intro, assuming it will be the best compression I guess. So for comparison here is a jpg image of the same PNG. jpg is 24 bit unfrotunately and to my eyes the quality is worse (20:1 compression used). Already the jpeg blocks have started to appear in the green areas. The size is 4,151 bytes. Miss!
Not sure how big the lib would be to read these files...
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Mmm. Interesting experiments in the file sizes Taj :) The thing to remember with the logo is that at the time, 32 colours was really going overboard. Usually I'd have used at most 4 bitplanes in a logo. This logo was intended to be a splash screen.
If you look at the original logo under a lot of magnification, you'll see that there is a lot of dithering, especially on the background. It's these switchs in colour that really bump up the file size. In practice, after the intro had been packed with kkrunchy or even upx, it would give plenty of room to play with if it was used in a PC intro. If you want to use it Taj, you're welcome, it was an unreleased piece.
Looking at the two versions you've posted, as a coder I might even commit the same crime, but as the artist who drew the logo, I hate them both. I remember I did some art for a uk group called Plague, I used to draw 2 bitplane medres logos for their music disks, I did a lot of logos for them, and one time I made a really nice logo for an intro that Matrix was coding.
Matrix wanted to grab an extra bitplane so he forced my logo into 16 colours and destroyed it, that was the last time I did any gfx for him.
In most 64kb intros, for reasons of space, vector fonts tend to get used a lot.
This logo would squish down really small once it was put into an exe.
But it's probably not suitable anyway as it is in 320 X 240 :)
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I can take a hint ;-) No worries I wont be destorying it an any productions...luckily I dont do anything as huge as 64k
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Lol, there's no way it'd go into 1kb :)
Probably a nice logo could be generated in 1K, I'm surprised that I've never really seen anything like that done yet.
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Don't forget after windows setup you get like 400 bytes to play with in a 1k. A logo is a huge sacrifice in space.
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Maybe something could be done with beziers ? :)
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There's a reasonable compo in this - who can make a self contained exe that exactly reproduces the original image in as few bytes as possible? They ran one like that on hugi. http://www.frontiernet.net/~fys/hugi/compoold.htm#compo7
Jim
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OK just for the reference you get karma up. Damn - 6k including unpacker - amazing.
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If you use pngcrush, http://pmt.sourceforge.net/pngcrush/ , on that 3k png you get another 26 bytes out of it :)
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;D Does the image quality suffer much more?
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Looks the same to my programmer eyes :)
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*Grumbles under breath!*
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What do you think of the difference :)
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I'd say thank you for raping my logo ;D
Seriously though I'd be up for anyone using that logo in a prod if they promised not to reduce the bit depth and change it's look.
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Haha. I meant compared to the already broken 3k version on page 1 :)
Your welcome by the way :D
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Um ok, in comparison it's a little bit smaller. hehe! how's that? :)
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i can see where your coming from shockwave its amazing the amount of detail lost in reducing the image i think 33k is fine for the image most of my own pngs turn out about 350k ;D
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It's the background that kills the file size really Nino :) There is so much dithering, remember that this logo was drawin with Dpaint4 on the Amiga so you needed to do the dithering to get a really smooth transition of colour.
Packing algorithms don't seem to like dithering :)
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Aha that explains the sudden reduction down to two shades of green in the background. I hit the no dithering button (which you would to keep the size down). Didnt notice the green was dithered, I just thought the tool had done some very weird colour quantisation. So if the original image had spread the colours more evenly amongst the 32 it had (say 6 shades of green), it would not have looked so bad at 3k.
One of the problems I had in my old demogroup was the artists kept complaining about my code as they never got to be involved in small productions (you cant squeeze much art into 4k). On the other hand none of them was interested in size art: doing something beautiful in very few bytes. I even offered to write some tools but nobody was up for it. When I asked for creative use of 2 colour bit maps for a horror 4k, I got nothing: and there were a lot of artists in the group.
So in my defence :-) I'd say I'm often forced to butcher high-res "art" or avoid it completely until the glorious day I find an artist who wants to work in 500 bytes.
To be fair its the same for coders, we can do a *hell* of a lot more in 30k than in 4k but the competition is for 4k.
What would be interesting I think is to look into some sort of tool for size art. For example, shockwave, if I gave you a tool that could render a shaded 3d ellipsoid as a single command...then that green background could be done in (x,y,colour,xr,yr) or about 10 bytes but it would be rendered in 32 bit colour. Not having any artistic skill, I have no idea what would be useful and what not. On the flip side, I do know what could be done in few bytes in OpenGL.
Hmmmm...thinking out loud here, rambling, off topic. Sorry.
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The background to the logo could certainly have been created proceduraly.
If you want some low colour images taj, I'm a past master at 2 bitplane med res logos on the Amiga, I'm sure I could whip something up for you if you wanted something like that.
Of course the other available option is ascii art. it could well have it's place in a 4k or even 1kb.
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Thanks for the offer shockwave, I'll think about it for future products. Hey I feel a joint 4k coming on :-)
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Neat :)
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Aha that explains the sudden reduction down to two shades of green in the background. I hit the no dithering button (which you would to keep the size down). Didnt notice the green was dithered, I just thought the tool had done some very weird colour quantisation. So if the original image had spread the colours more evenly amongst the 32 it had (say 6 shades of green), it would not have looked so bad at 3k.
One of the problems I had in my old demogroup was the artists kept complaining about my code as they never got to be involved in small productions (you cant squeeze much art into 4k). On the other hand none of them was interested in size art: doing something beautiful in very few bytes. I even offered to write some tools but nobody was up for it. When I asked for creative use of 2 colour bit maps for a horror 4k, I got nothing: and there were a lot of artists in the group.
So in my defence :-) I'd say I'm often forced to butcher high-res "art" or avoid it completely until the glorious day I find an artist who wants to work in 500 bytes.
To be fair its the same for coders, we can do a *hell* of a lot more in 30k than in 4k but the competition is for 4k.
What would be interesting I think is to look into some sort of tool for size art. For example, shockwave, if I gave you a tool that could render a shaded 3d ellipsoid as a single command...then that green background could be done in (x,y,colour,xr,yr) or about 10 bytes but it would be rendered in 32 bit colour. Not having any artistic skill, I have no idea what would be useful and what not. On the flip side, I do know what could be done in few bytes in OpenGL.
Hmmmm...thinking out loud here, rambling, off topic. Sorry.
Heh, Now I know which group you're talking about, nice to see you here :)