@jason@teh.entar.net2024-03-08 01:21:48
Long story about Scratch and a vast empty field full of tiny bears
My son and I do some simple game projects in Scratch. Scratch is cool. But the situation has a problem: the Boy likes to show the stuff we make to his friends at school. They have Chromebooks provided by the school. Chromebooks come with Chrome installed, and the kids can't install stuff, so Chrome is the only available browser. Chrome has a bug: one webpage can have at most about 500 distinct images. Google is aware of this bug and has been for a long time - they don't seem to have any intent to fix it. So, if you start using sprites with animations, for an RPG, say, you will quickly blow out this 500-image limit. One mob might easily have 30 or 40 frames.
So I had an idea.
The scratch screen is 480x360. What if I "blew up" a spritesheet so that each 16x16 image had a 480-pixel transparent pad between it and its left and right neighbors, and a 360-pixel transparent pad between it and its up and down neighbors? Then I could just load one image - the exploded spritesheet - and when I drew it I would set the offset so that the one image I wanted was at the screen coordinates I wanted. Because of the pads, all of the other images would necessarily be off the screen.
So I wrote a C program to call ImageMagick programs to explode the spritesheet, and that worked fine. The exploded spritesheet is about 9000 x 6000 pixels, but it's only 90k. But then I tried to upload it and hit Scratch's image size limit, enforced on upload, which is like 900x700.
But (the forums said) you could defeat that by making an svg! You can tell it the svg size is whatever pixels, it's stroked. Sure, it's 900 x 700 with a lot of tiny little bears in different poses, each smaller than a pixel.
Unfortunately automated png-to-svg conversion is not something current technology has really solved, or at least not adobe's online converter. It turned all of my bears into little brown smears.
My next plan is to bypass Scratch's image upload size limiter by exporting my scratch program, unzipping it, inserting the image directly in there, rezipping it, and reuploading. I have had some luck with this sort of thing before. But I am about out of energy for this project for today so I thought instead I would write about it on here.
