For about a year I have been using my tool to compress VN event graphics, and I have been very pleased with the results. The usefulness of the program greatly increased when I found games having event graphics with up to 200 small variations, instead of the just 2-5 I thought was the norm.
I have been putting the final touches to the program, with the two major additions being:
- The final output is now validated against the input images, to make sure the compressor does not produce faulty output without your knowing. So far it have been very reliable.
- The compressor can now also compress images containing transparency. The implementation didn’t take it into account and complicated adding it as an afterthought, but with a bit of rewriting it now works quite well.
The importance of this is that it can now also be used for compressing character sprites.
The code is available at: cgCompress at GitHub
So why am I not making an release yet? Because I don’t think it will be very useful if it does not properly integrate with your desktop environment. So my next step is to create a decoder to the Windows Imaging Component (WIC) framework. This will make it supported in many Microsoft applications, including Windows Photo Viewer and File Explorer.
I have already been experimenting a bit with WIC, and while I can’t say I can make a high quality implementation, getting something to work shouldn’t be too hard.