Topic: Very, very big maps.

[JonLeung]

Today I posted sprays's Circle Of The Moon map, which is the largest map we've seen yet - a 16.1 MB .PNG!



I noticed that the Harmony Of Dissonance maps (by Zeric) were put up on the 28th of last month - almost exactly a month ago - and those come in at 11.1 MB and 10.4 MB.  A week ago I put up The Faery Tale Adventure map by DarkWolf, an 8.48 MB .png (the map isn't even full scale, wow), and that rounds out the top 4 largest maps, beating out the previous record holder, which was a .JPG (The Citadel Island map from Relentless: Twinsen's Adventure, made by Assassin, 7.23 MB) so the different filetypes don't really make it a fair comparison.



Of course, there's the issue of .PNG compression since we're talking about filesize... sprays thought the advancecomp program was a better compressor than PNGGauntlet (which itself is essentially PNGOut, I believe).  If PNGGauntlet/PNGOut was used on the Circle Of the Moon map and truly didn't compress it as much, it doesn't change its heavyweight status as it would still be the largest.  I guess the question is how large The Faery Tale Adventure's map would be if it was full-sized?



As I said in the news post, the sudden flow of large maps is interesting.  Is there some kind of competition going on to see who can make the largest map?  o_0



If there were such things as animated .PNGs (or animated .GIFs that could somehow have 16.7 million colours instead of just 256 maximum), a full-sized, pixel-perfect, animated map of Zebes from Super Metroid would probably be pretty large...  >_>

[DarkWolf]

The true size of the Faery Tale Adventure World map is 128 x 128 tiles.  (I trimmed off a few of the water tiles on the 1:4 map to make it look a little more centered.)



Each tile is 256 x 256 in size.



(256 * 128)^2 = 1,073,741,824 pixels OR a 32,768 x 32,768 image.



To display the image in 24-bit color the computer will need three bytes for each pixel in memory.  So the final result is 3,221,225,472 bytes, or exactly 3 gigs of memory (if you use 1024 instead of 1000).



Of course, an 8-bit PNG would be less space on disk, but viewing the image would still require loads of memory.



Doing a full size PNG is out of the question.  Even if I wrote a C program to write the image to disk tile by tile, who'd be able to open it?



I can do an HTML table version of the map which seems to work fairly well in most browsers.  If someone wants to really see a 1:1 representation I'll do it.

[KingKuros]

The world maps of The 7th Saga I've done (Ticondera - past and present), if left whole, would have been 17408 x 13376 and about 10 MB (un-PNGGauntleted) each.

[marioman]

While we are on the subject of large maps, what program(s) do you recommend to view those monsters?  Is there a Windows program or IE/Firefox addon that can handle them?  I am trying to view the Metroid 2 overworld map, and I cannot find a program that can process the file.  (And the map is only 3 MB.)



Thanks.

[DarkWolf]

The default Windows Picture and Fax Viewer has been able to handle any file size I've ever thrown at it.

[marioman]

I tried that but it usually stalls/crashed when I give it a big file.

[TerraEsperZ]

I've always been a fan of Irfanview, a freeware graphic viewer that's small and easy to use. It can also be used to convert pictures to a large number of file formats, and resize them or alter their color depth, plus a whole lot of other options.



It's been my best friend for a while now, and I've always used it to browse through screenshots when pasting them in Paint.



---

"With the first link, the chain is forged. The first speech censored, the first thought forbidden, the first freedom denied, chains us all irrevocably." [...] The first time any man's freedom is trodden on, we're all damaged. - Captain Jean-Luc Picard



B*tch, meet reality. Reality, meet b*tch. - Me

[marioman]

Irfanview works great!  Thanks Terra.

[JonLeung]

I use CompuPic Pro, which is handy for many things.  I've ranted enough about it in other topics.  It's certainly not freeware, though.



As for viewing things while still online, as I mentioned, Opera had no problem with the biggest maps that IE refused to load.  I suppose there are limitations around your related configurations and hardware and memory, so you may have different results.  I'm not an advocate of any browser in particular (I'm "guilty" of sticking with IE for the most part, but I certainly don't love Microsoft, I just stick with what I'm used to) but having other browsers may be one simple workaround.

[TerraEsperZ]

I consider Internet Explorer the plague of web surfing. Kinda like sleeping with lots of old and sick prostitutes without any protection whatsoever. Anyway, as soon as install Windows anywhere, I immediately install Mozilla Firefox to minimize the risks of spyware, annoying popups and dangerous ActiveX code. But really, anything except IE will do that.



---

"With the first link, the chain is forged. The first speech censored, the first thought forbidden, the first freedom denied, chains us all irrevocably." [...] The first time any man's freedom is trodden on, we're all damaged. - Captain Jean-Luc Picard



B*tch, meet reality. Reality, meet b*tch. - Me

[JonLeung]

I could have sworn I had another more recent topic about large maps...

Anyway, in terms of filesize, Command&Conquer-RedAlert2-Yuri'sRevenge-Allies-ALL02UMD-Mission2-HollywoodAndVain.png (25.6 MB) has been bested by RageOfMages-26-RoadToTheTower.png (54.2 MB), which as you can see is more than double the filesize!  LDK says he's PNGGauntleted that already, so I'll take his word for it because I know it'll take forever to run it myself.  LDK sure loves his PC RTS games, which seem to easily pass the 15+ MB mark.

[Maxim]

I ran it through PNGOUT with /f0 and saved 8MB.

Edit: and the C&C map you mentioned isn't optimised at all, it seems.

[LDK]

Every map I submit is procesed by PNGGauntlet. Simply because Photoshop has slow PNG export so I'm saving every map in BMP and then compress them by PNGGauntlet with Xtreme! option. Advanced options are set to default.

I've ran CnC map again and it didn't save a byte. But maybe I'm doing something wrong

[Maxim]

As I've mentioned before, screenshot maps generally compress best with the /f0 parameter. PNGOUT defaults to /f0 for paletted images and /f5 for true-colour, so maps with more than 256 colours need to override this default. PNGGauntlet lets you do this by choosing "Filter Type: None" in the advanced options, but it's worth checking both settings. The "compression strategy" in PNGGauntlet is kind of pointless, there's never any reason to not use "Xtreme!".

That C&C map reduces to 14.5MB, such a huge change I assumed it was a poorly-compressed source image. However, at /f5 it does come out the same, so I'd assumed wrong.

[LDK]

You are right. I'm running CnC maps with None filter type and there is 30 - 40% size reduction. Kinda stupid not to read manual 

Jon do you want me to send you all my files again? (I will be recompressing them anyway)