First off, does anyone know of any good ways to considerably speed up
the displaying of large, high-quality images in MetaCard? I'm
working with large jpeg files (around 1300 x 500 pixels) and bringing
them up takes not just a wait, but usually a couple seconds before
they display. Anyway to speed this up, other than to get a faster
computer? (I'm on a Power Mac G3/333, which isn't an underpowered
machine reallly...)
Secondly, while looking for new ways to get images to load quicker, I
just found out about Vector Quantization techniques for compressing images.
There's a good article describing the methods of this compression technique
at:
http://www.gamasutra.com/features/20010416/features/ivanov_01.htm
To summarize, the technique of vector quantization for compressing and
decompressing images is extremely useful for games, as processor-intensive work
only goes into initially compressing the image (to get images prepared you'd
have to spend a few hours batch processing them into the compressed version of
the file) , whereas decompressing the image is extremely fast, magnitudes times
faster than decompressing things like JPEG and PNG graphics.
I realize it would take some time to implement these features, but if there was
an easy-to-use way of MetaCard/Revolution either importing these images, or at
least displaying a certain type of these images, it would definitely
makes time-intensive things (like games) go much faster.
Any possibility this ever sneaking its way into MC or Rev? If it
would speed up displaying images that much, I'd be much more
interested in supporting the program that would do that...
--
Karl Becker, KB Productions - http://www.karlbecker.com
Featuring:New Tricks, Tiger's Eye Casino, and The Fishin' Hole
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