GIF - June 20th
 

A quick note: on the 20th of June 2003 the GIF patent is expiring, meaning we can legally use it then. PNGs have better compression and allow more things (24bit colors, alpha transparency supported in v3) and MNGs support many interesting features, but surely GIF animations are easier to do.

Wonderful, I have always hated this MNG deal. Gives nothing but problems. I like PNGs for the still graphics, but as far as animation goes, I think GIF is superior.

Re: GIF - June 20th
 

I dont like the way alot of mng's look, they dont look as good as gif.
I am in the process now of changing all the gif's on my levels to png/mng...already converted all of them...
lol, it has taken me a week to get to the E's

Edit: Wait, are you saying that we can use Gif's??????????

Re: Re: GIF - June 20th
 

Yes, on June 20th, we can legally use GIFs again.

Well, DUH....

Dont be a friggin ass....Stefan posted over a week ago that Graal would no longer support gif files, so here I am changing everything...now he says this...what a crock of crap :grrr:

PNG/MNG is better anyway. It's a lossless format, so there's no way a GIF could look better...

I have compared the 2, and gif animations look better, and are easier to make

Yeah, but they do loose some colour and quality. Oh well who cares, we can use GIF. And Gifs are useful when people aren't making really big images and I like the way they work.

That isnt my beef anyway...the fact that I have been converting everything over for over a week because he said Graal will no longer support gif's burns me up...I could really care less which format is used, but I do care about wasting my time

Well I doubt he knew until very recently. Yes it is annoying as alot of people have probably been converting.

Better in what way? Perhaps it is the fault of your graphics program, and not the format itself.

What makes the difference? They just look better to me, ok?
That isnt the issue anyway

I'm still not going to use GIF for any serious Graal purposes, as last I checked one of the advantages of Graal 3.0 is that it allows png/mng with more than 256 colors.

Re: GIF - June 20th
 

Hahahahahaha....

Who wants to break it to UN that GIFs are going to be legal? They just spent the last month or so converting and deleting GIFs.

*feels sorry for Moon God(dess)*

Stefan, you should probably filter the graphics extensions to .png and .mng, they support 24bit-colors, and would be the better choice according to you.

Who had the GIF patent anways? And, how were they keeping people from using GIFs?

I BELIVE CompuServe own the patent. (AOL owns CompuServ remeber). And they can stop anyone from useing it since they own the compression method.

Thats would be correct:
Compuserve Graphics Interchange (.gif)

It's like the time I converted all of Providence from .graal to .nw links level names etc.. Only to find out after I was done that there was a program which did it for you in a matter of seconds. Man was I fuming. ;x

haha i was just thinking that =P I saw that you posted here and thought
'Hmm...Marty is probably *****ing about the time I made him convert all of Providence's levels and then I found a program to do it the day after'
XD <3

Well, I am still going to continue the converting process, who is to say later on we are told again we have to get rid of gif's....might as well do it now...I just wont be in such a hurry to do it now since graal will still support gif files

*Makes a program to convert all the levels/scripts with .gif to change to .png....* hehe

We said it 2 years ago or so, didn't know the thing is going to be free soon. The legallity of supporting gifs was not clear, Unisys only charged the producers of programs that could write gifs. png and mngs are better than gif because they use better compression and allow more options, like mngs can contain jpegs or be 24bit. A problem is that many programs don't support them correctly, Adobe even had problems with png.
The gif format formerly referenced as 'compuserve interchange format' because it was the image format used in the compuserve network, later when it was becoming famous in the internet someone got the idea to charge fees for using it and bought the patents.

Err, you also posted a week or two ago that graal wasnt going to support gif's anymore =/

I heard about Graal not using .gifs anymore, but what stoped people from using them? I looks through my webgifs folder and find that most of them are .gifs. So i dont know what really stoped people from uploading gifs, lol.

...I think you're being over-hostile here. The difference is that if a better program converts them perfectly - such that they don't look worse than GIFs, and often look better - then PNGs and MNGs will purely be a better choice for your world. That knowledge is surely of some use...

I know for a fact that when I save images as GIFs they get all "spotted" with different colors. So I always used PNGs.

I am using the gif2mng program to convert them...it doesnt matter anyway because I am still going to convert them all anyway, and I wasnt being hostile...It might be that they just look different on my computer, I dont know
I agree, I like the png's better too

I was just wondering Stefan why is it you don't think the patents will be renewed again?If they don't someone will come along and pick them up and start charging for the use of them. Ehh well Npulse will still convert away from them and will not use gifs or allow them to be submitted to us in levels and such. It's just too much work to convert all of them so if we keep up with it then it's not an issue.We will just maintain the png/mng format and not use gifs.

I was reading about it somewhere. One of the reasons, not the main, but one of the reasons is they could not stop the spread of gifs. Its like file sharing programs, they stopped Napster but with so many of them about now, and billions of files being exchanged all of the time its almost impossible to stop.

Anyhow I'm happy. As programs such as PSP and other things had to pay Unisys to save into their file extension, so prices should drop. But if they have enough sales anyway from the prices they have, they will probably not drop much, or at all, to gain more profit.

pretty sure the client won't let you display them anymore.. it appears that way at least.. i've displayed images as GIFs but it didn't work, but worked fine while using a PNG :x

Gifs showed up and worked more than PNGs in my graal client =/

I think those companies would buy a mass license to include the support for the format in the program code, and not have to pay per-copy. Along those lines i don't think an extra charge was tacked on to each copy's price and i don't think it's there to remove... assuming they would.

They would yes. But lets say photoshop buy a mass licence for GIF, how many people have photoshop? Millions! So it would cost ALOT of money, so they add it onto the photoshop per copy price so that they dont loose money. And to cover the cost of buying their mass licence.

That cost may already be included in the price now.

Yeah which is why I am hoping the prices of software like that may come down a little.

According to heise.de, we have to wait until June 2004, because only the American patent expires this year. The European and Japanese LZW patents are still valid. Therefore if you offer compressed GIFs to customers in Europe and Japan, you need to pay license money to the LZW patentars.

Also I see absolutely no reason to use GIF. PNG compresses better and provides more possibilities, such as more than 256 colors and alpha stuff (read: partial transparency). If your browser or whatever does not support PNG, get a better one.

Therefore, Stefan and Unixmad, you should make the Avatar thingie no longer accept GIF graphics but only PNGs :) (which are currently not supported!)

Because Unisys owns .gif license and does not plan to renew the patent after 2004. If someone wants to "renew" it, it has to be Unisys or someone who buys it from Unisys. It doesn't become public domain.