@willowbellows

DEVLOG 4: ROME WASN’T BUILT IN 1hr59m

Sorry for the random title, but this is the valley of failure at the moment, since now I’ve got a system that has the potential to beat the jpg image size, but I’m a fool against well-worn and professional opponents (the jpg empire, but we also must assert dominance over the png.
The images really don’t have to be subpar because there’s just an alignment issue, but I figure it’s good to get in the habit of more frequent updates, maybe someone knows the answer. It’s probably something simple, but I know I’ll be looking at my code for a long, long time, so here’s a little snippet of the progress. Lmk if it’s obvious what the problems are.

Oh, before I forget, as I debug its been nice to work with the official image format name, .egg!

NO OTHER PLATFORM IN THE WORLD UNDERSTANDS .egg FORMAT! so thanks @Vini @stratustraipsing and @not-willem for being early commenters (but we don’t discriminate against those just finding out about the new way of image compressing life). I’m doing this for you guys! Follows, likers, and people who read to the end get to see these devlogs that don’t go viral. The good stuff is at the end anyways, so you guys deserve it.

Today’s good news: 60 KiB image turned into 10KiB superb image
Today’s bad news: IMAGES ARE BAD. for now
Next Year’s good news: We will have conquered the world by then

DEVLOG #3: RENEWAL. COMMENT NAMES PLZ
The last few days have been all about migrating to Rust. Not that I know Rust.
For those just joining the stream, Don’t stop reading yet as I want your beautiful mind.
In this project WE are creating more superb images through compression. We will take in an image and turn it into something using small number of bits. Of course, we are smaller and weaker than Big JPG and PNG, so we will have to undercut by making our images more “superb” (legally this is called ugly).

Step one of quest was taking in a PNG or JPG and turning it into our custom format.

this went all fair and good, and of course we must now have something able to read our custom format since for some reason our random sequence of bits is niche. Thankfully there are some files in my project that allow us to read in our custom format of bits and turn it into the image we are trying to display.

Not to get too far in the details but now I have it so each pixel can be one of 4 different colors, and each pixel uses two bits. Thusly, colors represented by 00, 01, 10, 11. Who needs more than that right? This is still obviously super massive and can easily be compressed further by not assigning each individual pixel, but i figure this is a milestone in itself. Since its just numbers, the language is up to us, we are the encoder and the decoder. So I was thinking of adding pallettes in case you want to display the same bits in different colors than RGB, just changing up interpretation. For now, I’m keeping the only place that can read our custom format hidden because its UGLY (i mean, superb!).

I’ll make github more public if I have to or if anyone cares about REPLACING OUR PNG OVERLORDS.

So, heres where I need you. THANKS SO MUC H MORE READING TO THE END. Now, you are rewarded by telling em what you think the latest and greatest image format should be.
Called .star? .foo? I figure the people are always right.

Devlog 2: Better encoding and larger images: Encoding still simplifies colors, but now it is able to condense larger stretches of pixels into fewer characters. Looking into the personal site options so other users can encode/decode their images.

Devlog 1: Hello superb images. Downgrading graphics since 2026, but making it easier to send over anything (new file extension?)