Currently, we have a max 128x128 screen shot per image when you look at a game on marp/tournament marp.

(1) TO zwaxy and pat: How feasable would it be to add an additional option for those use who don't care about gif bandwidth to allow a larger screen shot format max 256x256 (size debatable)?

(2) Would the users like/want this? Would it be good to have for a site show off point of view?

(3) Are the screen shots that we currently have satisfactory, do we want to change some of them so they more acruatley represent the game(s) played with in? I've tried my best to represent the game with one screen shot but i'm sure to have made some errors along the way.

I've already got scripts that will make a new pristine quality set of high colour png images of a given max size like the gifs images i'm already making at 128x128. So creating the better res/more color images isn't a problem, it's just should we do that and can we?

-- Anonymous, July 19, 2000

Answers

I would just say that I believe the majority of MARP users, (myself excluded), still have dial-up or slow connection rates. Quadrupuling the size of the graphics would only annoy those who have to wait that much longer for page loads. I think there is a good balance right now between pics and text data. Larger pics would mean less room for data going across and take up more space vertically. This would mean more scrolling and possibly a relayout of several templates. As far as poor screen shots--can't think of any right now...

-- Anonymous, August 31, 2000

Actually a 256x256 png would be comperable in size to a 128x128 gif. png's compression is better. I would estimate it to be close to twice the size perhaps a little less, but i really have to do it to all the screenshots know for sure, perhaps i'll give it a whirl and give what the ratio would be.

Also default new users would be given the 128x128 screenshot variant, and only high bandwidth users would select the 256x256 option and really low bandwidthers can choose the "no screenshot" option (like the can at the moment.)

-- Anonymous, August 31, 2000

Alright the numbers are in for 1542 snapshot image sizes: GIF Images max 128x128 scaling 96 with 256 colors: 12M
PNG Images max 128x128 scaling 96 with 256 colors: 10M
PNG Images max 200x200 scaling 150 with 1024 colors: 48M
PNG Images max 200x200 scaling 175 with 2048 colors: 50M
Noticibly the image sizes of pngs are smaller with the same number of colors. But adding colors and resolution blows up the size pretty large. but bandwidth isn't the issue here since only high bandwidth users would have the high bandwidth snap shot selection. Also we'd do away with Xerox or who ever owns the copyright to gif compression trying to get money from marp because marp has gif images on it.

-- Anonymous, September 01, 2000

So how would the new size impact the page layout? Is it a straight image substitution or do we need to rearrange stuff???

-- Anonymous, September 02, 2000

Changing from gif to png would be partially trivial, zwaxy reads in the sizes of each image dynamically set the img width and height tags from the actual image file. We'd have to change the code that reads in the height and width from png files instead of gif files and of course change the url from gif to png.

To add another format option would be a harder task. Right now the users can select no images, small images or large images. The large images is just a change in the img tag that doubles the pixel size of the small format image. If you had another sized resolution image you'd have to create another directory to urlize them from.

Either way is doable but requires zwaxy's help i think, but I really need to look at the png snapshots to make sure they look as good (the same) as the gifs even though they are 2 megs smaller. But pngs are better i think because the compression is free. I'd really like to see a larger resolution option, but we'd have to consider the bandwidth it would introduce but i doubt it would waste an inordinate amount of resources, i think marp wastes more memory and disk io than bandwidth on retrogames by far.

Changing the table size isn't as hard as you think since it's already being done dynamically since the small screenshots aren't all the same size, but they do have maximum resolutions of 128x128. If you want different image formats/sizes, just tell me where to email/ftp them too. I'd almost want to do a jpg format but the last time i tried it the screenshots look crappy (almost as bad as the win32 Q&A shots :) I can try again, though.

-- Anonymous, September 03, 2000