APNG support and GIFs

[⚡Energy™⚡]

Hey hey!
I was wondering if we could eventually get APNG support for the engine? The engine does open them, but they either do nothing or go crazy. For now they can easily be converted to GIF so they do work as intended, but I'm lazy. :D

Also, just out of pure curiosity: Why do I have to rebuild 99 percent of all my GIFs with the option to not stack frames, in order to play them without errors? While the engine does play them normally after that Irfan view for example does have issues with them most of the time. So for whatever reason I always have to keep 2 versions of all GIFs, one for the engine and one for everything else.

[Anfia /s]

.apng format isn't supported on Steam Workshop catalogue, at least for now until Valve enable .apng support on them.

AFAIK, currently .apng format only supported for developer/publisher on the Steam Store catalogue (example, when you browsing a game/app, sometimes on the catalogue you'll see the animated preview images on their description below, and when you check it on the web browser (not in steam client browser), you'll see some of them using .apng instead .gif).

[Anfia /s]

Also, keep in mind that .apng is still beta in general availability on many of the web content, even on the social media itself not fully supported .apng format for now.

[⚡Energy™⚡]

Originally posted by Anfia:

Also, keep in mind that .apng is still beta in a general availability on the web content, even on the social media itself not fully supported .apng format for now.

I didn't even know that stuff existed until I was wondering why what I thought was a GIF acted up like crazy, and then saw that it actually is a png file.
I thought I missed something. So no idea how new or old it is, or how widely spread or supported. ^^

Btw it doesn't even say apng if you save those files, they're just pngs. Irfan View can open them just fine though, and you cna already convert GIFs to APNG and vice versa on the fly, so it's not the biggest problem anyway.

[Rhy]

Is there a specific reason you don’t want to import your animations as sequence? They‘ll probably be supported better and don’t rely on restrictions as heavy as a gif.

[⚡Energy™⚡]

Originally posted by Ass Pancakes ||||| blw.tf:

Is there a specific reason you don’t want to import your animations as sequence? They‘ll probably be supported better and don’t rely on restrictions as heavy as a gif.

Other than that a simple Gif is enough for my purpose AND that effects work fine on GIF layers... uhm no. :D

[Anfia /s]

Originally posted by ⚡Energy™⚡:

Originally posted by Anfia:

Also, keep in mind that .apng is still beta in a general availability on the web content, even on the social media itself not fully supported .apng format for now.

I didn't even know that stuff existed until I was wondering why what I thought was a GIF acted up like crazy, and then saw that it actually is a png file.
I thought I missed something. So no idea how new or old it is, or how widely spread or supported. ^^

Btw it doesn't even say apng if you save those files, they're just pngs. Irfan View can open them just fine though, and you cna already convert GIFs to APNG and vice versa on the fly, so it's not the biggest problem anyway.

Some of them save it on the .apng extension, some of them also save them on standard .png extension. It's similiar works on H.264 & H.265 (a.k.a. HEVC) that saving it to the .mp4 or .mkv video file extensions.

Read more: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/APNG

[Biohazard]

You can import multiple PNG files at once and they will be turned into what an apng essentially is - a sequence of PNG. Just select all PNG files and drag & drop them into the editor at once.

The GIF format is not well defined and popular browsers adopted weird hacks regarding translucency. Irfanview also has tons of bugs for me, Chrome has weird translucency tricks.

I think we made an improvement for GIF importing in the next update, maybe this helps you, but we will likely not adopt hacks from browsers. Anyway, if you use a PNG sequence then you get better quality at no additional performance cost (at least in WE).

[⚡Energy™⚡]

No need for weird hacks, really. If a GIF doesn't work in the Engine it's a 99,9% case of strange frame stacking or something that can easily be resolved. I honestly don't mind that, I was just curious why that even happens.

I'll have a look at the png sequence stuff and how good it works with effects though. Thanks. ^^

[Rhy]

The gif workarounds are all very tacky and a ton of apps have their own way of handling such an outdated format. For more insight on how they are being displayed can be seen here: https://wunkolo.github.io/post/2020/02/buttery-smooth-10fps/

as well as in the imagemagick docs, where you might find a ton of nifty tricks used to make it less horrible, while somehow leaving even more room to break stuff: https://legacy.imagemagick.org/Usage/anim_basics/