Galfar’s Lair

APNG loading and animating implementation for Imaging wasn’t very hard work. However, there are not that many test images to be found on the Internet and most of the available ones are very simple. They’re usually not using disposal methods and are basically just collection of independent images. Big difference compared to GIF files – some of them were quite difficult to animate right. I even got most of nontrivial APNG test files by converting some more complex animated GIF files. Tools for creating APNG images are not yet as sophisticated as some GIF animation tools – there’s GIF to APNG converter, APNG Anime Maker, and some web based tools that assemble simple APNG file from bunch of uploaded single PNG frames.

Now I’m gonna extend PNG saver to allow saving multi images to simple APNG files, much like MNG saving works now. There’s really not a good unified way how to pass some more information to image file savers in current library design – that’s one of TODOs for new Imaging architecture.

I started working on support for APNG format for Imaging library. APNG is unofficial extension of PNG image file format created by two guys from Mozilla Corporation. The point of APNG is to allow storing simple animations in PNG files (hence the “A” for “Animated”).

There is already PNG-like chunk based format for animations called MNG (already supported by Imaging – at least the basic features). However, MNG is quite complex format and its support among browsers and image viewers/editors is lacking. Code library supporting all MNG features is huge.

APNG on the other hand is just an extension of PNG and its implementation is not so complex. I’m going to load only the raw frames from files at first and see what will have to be done to support animating the frames next. Canvas class will have to be used here for alpha blending subsequent frames to previous ones. I’ll add option to turn the animating on/off just like it is available for animated GIF files.

More info about APNG: http://www.animatedpng.com and https://wiki.mozilla.org/APNG_Specification.

I created new web site based on Wordpress at http://galfar.vevb.net/wp/ few months and I’ve been slowly transferring content there since then. It’s ready now so I’ll redirect http://galfar.vevb.net/ to the new site in a moment. Old one will still be available at http://galfar.vevb.net/cms/ but all the old content should be available here too.

Current theme is just temporary, I’ll look for something more to my liking later (going away for a week in few hours) and probably do some modifications. I’ve tried quite a few themes already but there was always some glitch (no header margins, wrong image alignment, etc.).

I’ve been working in Modula-2 for last few weeks. It’s a considered a dead language now, one of Pascal’s descendants designed by Niclaus Wirth. I’ve been doing some updates to quite an old project, embedded system for military usage.  I had to run Mac OS 7.5 emulator to get original 1989 compiler running. Modula-2 dialect understood by this compiler is quite strict – you cannot even mix cardinal and integer numbers without explicitly converting one of them.

First difference you may notice (compared to Pascal) is case sensitiveness of Modula-2, for instance all reserved words are upper cased. You don’t have to write so many begin-end statements though. Another C-like trait is importance of header files (definition modules) order during compiling – just change it a little bit in a large project and whole thing breaks down.

More info about Modula-2 if you’re interested: http://www.modula2.org/.

I wasn’t sure if Vampyre Imaging Library works right in Mac OS X until few weeks ago. One poster in Imaging’s forum wrote a post about scrambled images produced by the library on Mac OS X. Fortunately, the problem was related only to Lazarus LCL support – all other functionality worked fine.

After not so straightforward installation of Mac OS X in VMWare I fixed the issue just by changing number “24” to “32” in the code (TRawImage.Description.Depth field, LCL raw image to TBitmap conversion). Apparently, Carbon created bitmap with 6 bits per color channel. Now I just need to check if 24->32 change doesn’t break anything when using other LCL widget sets (I’m sure there was a reason for 24bits since I vaguely remember 32bits were there few years ago) – so maybe conditional compilation will be needed here.

Another issue I noticed is that LCL Imager demo couldn’t load default image (Tigers.jpg) that is displayed when it is started without parameters. Demo uses relative path to the image but (from Demos/Bin to Demos/Data directory). Mac OS X application LCLImager.app is placed in Demos/Bin directory by Lazarus but it is not a simple single file. It’s a directory itself and actual demo executable is located somewhere inside. I’ve not really decided on solution yet. Maybe embed the image in the executable as resource?

See the difference?

My Vampyre Imaging Library was updated to version 0.26.2 few days ago. This was mostly fix/patch/update release with no significant new features.

I decided to remove Kylix support (CLX graphic classes, project files, build scripts, core library still compiles). It’s not working properly on many (all?) current Linux distros (so I can’t test) and it was abandoned by Borland/Codegear quite some time ago. It was nice to have DCC compiler in Linux and it also made Borland to make Delphi RTL crossplatform. There are rumors about crosscompiling features in upcoming Delphi releases (in 2010?)  so maybe we’ll see DCC in Linux again.

Instead of Kylix project files there are new ones for Delphi 2009. Imaging itself didn’t require many fixes to compile and work with Delphi 2009,  most of them were related to text-based file format loaders (XMP, PNM) and external libraries (JpegLib, ZLib).

More info and downloads at Imaging’s homepage.

Vampyre Imaging Library 0.26.0 was finally released few days ago. There are many canvas enhancements and support for 3Dc compressed formats. More info and downloads at project’s homepage: http://imaginglib.sourceforge.net.

I’m planning revamping this whole site. Maybe creating some sort of simple CMS myself or just some better way to handle the projects. I don’t enjoy coding in PHP but there’s not much choice.

New version of my Imaging library was released today. Check out the project homepage: http://imaginglib.sf.net

There has been no news for quite some time. This will change! Or maybe not.

Imaging 0.24.2 patch will hopefully be released soon (waiting for Lazarus 0.9.24 since there is LCL change that breaks Imaging’s LCL support for older Lazaruses). More about new Imaging can be found at its homepage. I also plan to release OpenJPEG (JPEG 2000 library) for Pascal independent on Imaging for those who just want JPEG 2000 for their programs.

I will (have to) start working on my Master’s thesis in very near future so you may expect some demos soon (terrain rendering stuff again).

Version 0.24.0 of Imaging has been released!
Main news/changes in 0.24.0:

• New image file format support: GIF (native), TIFF (libtiff), PSD (native).
• New image data format: BTC (block truncation coding).
• File format compatibility fixes (for BMP, JPEG, and DDS)
  and platform/compiler support fixes (Win64, UNIX, FPC, …).
• Bug fixes and some enhancements (buffered file IO, …).

Visit Vampyre Imaging Library Homepage for more news and downloads or Imaging Forum.