Neil BrownJun 29

Sometimes, I receive questions which leave both me, and the person asking, bamboozled.

> Your website loads so quickly! What CDN do you use?

There is no CDN. It is just really small and simple, mostly text.

> Sure, but is that Cloudflare, or...?

None. It is a tiny website, just a few kilobytes per page, on a tiny server, at my home, connected to the Internet via my ISP, Andrews & Arnold.

> But are you / they in the cloud?

No. The webserver is in Newbury, in my garage.

> Neil, please can you pass my questions to your technical person? I don't think you understand, your website cannot be in your home. It must be in the cloud or have a CDN.

*Neil puts on glasses and false nose and moustache*

Show threadHaelwenn /элвэн/ Jun 29
@neil No, see there is this old forgotten tech from the elders, you can store your data into the bush too!
Picture of the first Mario game on the NES. There are two screens. On the first we see a green bush on the ground. On the second one, there is a white cloud in the sky. Both sprites are the same, only their color palette changed.
Show threadJanne
@lanodan @neil didn't check but very likely this png image is wa larger than the original super mario game cartridge, which was 32 kilobytes..
Jun 29 at 8:09pmWeb
Show threadHaelwenn /элвэн/ Jun 29
@janvenetor @neil Yeah possible, like how readme files can be bigger than the demo on the demoscene side of things
Show threadAsahi Lina (朝日リナ) // nullptr::liveJun 30

@lanodan @neil @janvenetor The image is 10 kB ^^

It would actually be kind of sad if a clean PNG screenshot were larger than the whole game, since PNG should be pretty good at eliminating redundancy the same way the original game does!

I think this meme probably originally happened with degraded images (stuff like JPEG artifacts compressed as PNG again) which adds a bunch of hard to compress noise.

(Also, the game is technically 40KiB, 32K code + 8K graphics)

Show threadHaelwenn /элвэн/ Jun 30
@lina @neil @janvenetor Nah, look at it in a good image viewer, there's no jpeg artifacts (like jpeg can't do monochrome background like that).

And I'd kind of doubt PNG encoders are that clever, more likely that you could gain space by having the relevant parts of the sprite sheet in PNG + compact vector format (SVG isn't, more like flash).

Although trying to make it smaller: Passing it to pngcrush I get 7957 bytes instead of 10432.

Edited it a bit in LibreSprite as the red line joining the circles used anti-aliasing and so transparency (luckily circles don't), that encodes it to 8399 bytes.
And then passing that to pngcrush I get 6924 bytes, nearly 50% less but still pretty big.
(Interestingly making the red line+circles with the light-wood color of the ?-item box ends up at 6930 bytes)

> I just put up a megabyte high resolution photo as a login page background, on explicit customer request, and cried a bit :/ they are considering a background video :/

Urgh, I hate background videos, they always take so much time to load and sometimes it means actually important stuff loads afterwards if it's on the same CDN.
super mario bush cloud edited.out.png
Show threadHaelwenn /элвэн/ Jun 30
@lina @janvenetor @neil Oooh switched LibreSprite color mode to Indexed (No Dithering) which is probably somewhat lossy as otherwise pngcrush would have changed the color-mode, got 5673 bytes out, pngcrush'ed it and got a much more reasonable 4698 bytes.
super mario bush cloud edited.out.png
Show threadAsahi Lina (朝日リナ) // nullptr::live6d ago

@lanodan @neil @janvenetor Right, that's what I would expect! PNG isn't smart enough to do literal sprite/tile mapping but zlib compression is still pretty good at eliminating the duplication, and does a better job within tiles themselves which makes up for it in other ways.

What I meant is the original "this screenshot of SMB is larger than SMB" meme (it's a thing) probably used a really degraded screenshot, which is not the case here.

Show threadalcinnz6d ago
@lina @lanodan @neil @janvenetor My understanding is that ZLib is a core part of PNG compression?
Show threadAsahi Lina (朝日リナ) // nullptr::live6d ago
@alcinnz @lanodan @neil @janvenetor Yes.
Show threadAleš RoubíčekJun 30
@janvenetor @lanodan @neil it's just 10KiB PNG ;)
Show threadJanneJun 30

@alesroubicek @lanodan @neil so only one third of the mario game, and five times the working RAM memory of the console.

I just put up a megabyte high resolution photo as a login page background, on explicit customer request, and cried a bit :/ they are considering a background video :/

Show threadAleš RoubíčekJun 30
@janvenetor @lanodan @neil So you can load 92kB WASM implementation of NES emulator plus the game cartridge and be way more cool than the background video in a lot less download size :)