GIF Support

GIF support in SL please!!!!

Better yet, PNG.

Boso

Ack!!

NOOOOOOOO!

GIF Bad. Unisys crooks. GIF support means increased operational costs. Boycott GIF.

Besides, what could you possibly get from GIF support that you don't have with the BMP/TGA/JPG combination that's already supported?

Animation of course...

Then request AVIs all you want. But not GIF.

And in all honesty, there's very little difference in the way a GIF animation works and the way the LSL-based animations work. I just don't see the headaches and costs being worth it, when there are existing solutions and better options available for simple animations.

I thought they were adding movie support in 1.1, anyway.

Besides, it just doesn't make sense (to me) to have textures that are limited to 8-bit color in an application that only runs in 24-bit color, anyway.

Me agree. GIF heap bad.

Didn't the Unisys patent expire recently though? I thought I read that. I've been staying away from them too, for technical reasons. Too bad they haven't standardised on something else for web animations though.

Even if we roll up UNISYS in a big quilt and shoot it into outer space, GIF89A will still smell like poo.

Just the fact that people even CONSIDER using a 12 year format is silly! It doesnt even support more than 256 colors, for crying out loud, when was the last time you saw an 8 bit texture in SL or any other game?
The very latest I can remember is FF8 which was like 5 years ago or more, and it had way outdated graphics because it was a port from the PSX.

hehe

Nothing wrong with OLD formats man! I wish I had saved more stuff in TXT format over the years rather than the endlessly new versions of WP, Word, and on and on. While it doesn't matter so much any more the compression achieved by GIF files for much web content was good enough for how it was being used. JPG has that lossy compression that sometimes look OK, but other times look like the paint has bled. PNG seems to be a nice compromise, but its still hard to find of-line tools to manipulate them (except in Linux )

Anyway, plenty of good reasons not to use GIF, but its age isn't one of them.

*shuffles off to bed*

There's a post a couple of weeks old in one of the forums where a Linden (don't remember who) told us that all graphics uploaded to SL are converted to JPG2000 for internal storage and use. So it really doesn't matter whether you use TGA, BMP, or JPG, when LL get their digital hands on it, it becomes a JPG.

Uh, wasn't TGA invented by AT&T for their Targa video capture cards in like... 1984?

That aside, yes, GIF is dated compared to more modern formats such as PNG, but 24-bit colour wasn't what it was designed for. It was designed as a way to efficiently send image data over low-bandwidth networks. For its age, it does so quite nicely, plus it's not fixed-palette, so it can still be used today for many applications.

Unfortunately, SL is not one of them. We need a true-colour format, with alpha channel transparencies, in this case, JPEG2000. However, that's only internally. If you want to import graphics, you'll have to use Targa, as virtually no programs actually save as JPEG2000 yet. Regardless of what you upload your image as, it gets converted to JPEG2000 on the other end, so GIF animation just won't work.

Catherine

I was gonna post that as a joke, but it might work when limited to vectors, text and basic action script. Or even if they limited the file size to the same as an average texture. Well, I'm thinking along the lines of a big online world / web browser. I would like to see some html in SL as well.

Bah, probably wouldn't work anyway. I don't know of anything that can actually wrap a .swf around a mesh(not that I've looked)... seems like too much overhead to be practical.

Wouldn't work. Everything becomes Jpeg2000. You don't want GIF support, you want self-contained animation support, which is sort of asking for something else entirely.

Getting animation in SL is merely a matter of dividing a texture into frames and using texture offset and scaling controls to flip between the "framebuffers" in LSL. And it would support 32 bits per pixel instead of 8. And not suck as much.

Wow, that would be a great idea.

You could always use llSetTextureAnimate(or whatever it is).


Video, html, and flash support would be great, video and flash are doubtfull though, html could be a rare possibility.

The only thing gif is really good for is low color, low detail stuff (cartoonish as possible). JPG already beats it in almost every way. The only major advantage that GIF has over JPG is that it's lossless--the pixel colors won't change. But unless you're doing image processing or something, does it matter if a color goes from AA2255h to AB2153h? Human eye can't tell!

I'm gathering, that the only reason for jpegs at all are to save space on your drive. I mean uploading an artifact ridden Jpeg to a lossless format is kinda poopie, if indeed all SL textures are Jpeg2000. I'd like to see html added, at least to note files so I put up a feature suggestion of my own.

again I don't think Flash and movie support will work, but it's worth a try.

The Unisys patent expired globally a few days ago (expired in the US last year). GIF is a viable format. However, I would prefer PNG personally, as I am one of the few linux users, and most of the tools I work with (barring photoshop) use PNG natively.

-Adam

Well regardless, if all images are Jpg2000, then it doesn't matter if you could upload gifs. They would have to make a different type of upload or change the way it is converted when sent to the server. Since the whole graphics system is based on one texture type I assume it would a pain in the butt to code the feature and probably just as easy or more so to implement a script function that auto animated textrues or something similar.

I assume what Darwin meant was to actually add gif format so that it would be used in addition to jpeg2000, rather than converting everything, but I can't think of any real advantages.

True, JPEG and image compression is for saving hard drive space (not a big deal), but more importantly don't forget it conserves bandwidth! That's the big deal.

Just convert the frames of the gif into a texture map. Or mpeg. Or AVI. There is software that automates this.