... making strips twice the previous size in kilobytes while rendering exactly the same length and width.

Is this deliberate, some undiscussed benefit?

Or is it perhaps a product of moving.

The new extra weight adds mucho overhead to the page where they are displayed.

Can you enlighten me?

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Because it's good for wrestling. . .

I just rendered a couple and haven't noticed this. Do you have any examples laying around?

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www.bradsucks.net

if this one lasts long enough

it's 105992 bytes

that's big for a png compared to earlier ones.

It's no crisis but it doubles the picture overhead on the page when I run a series

:)

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Because it's good for wrestling. . .

That's odd because nothing has changed on the PNG rendering server. I'm thinking about switching it to jpeg anyways as the PNGs are just naturally pretty large.

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www.bradsucks.net

if the renderer made images png 8 rather than 32, the output size would be a lot smaller without a noticable drop in quality.

So far I haven't had any issues with PNG sizes.

Please don't change it to JPEG. PNG is nice because you don't get visual artifacts. (Text also looks better with PNG.) Converting PNG to JPEG is pretty easy for those who prefer JPEG for size reasons, but if the file is natively JPEG, there's no way to recover the quality. Just something to consider.

More colours = larger file size. Were you using the same background before? That particular bg will chunk out the file. Try it with a plain colour or no background and see what size it comes to.

PNG's are only large if there are a lot of colours.

Personally I hate JPEG, it sacrifices a lot of quality for a minor reduction in file size. As Xuan said it'll either have serious artifact issues or make very little difference. On the other hand though, it's quicker to take a screen dump than wait for the renderer anyway, and then people can have any format they like.

GIF's are better if you can limit the colours correctly and if the program you use is good enough (photoshop make beautiful GIF's, paint GIF's are laughable). The other problem here being that some images need more colours. 128 would probably do for most images though. Alternately you'd have to do a seperate render feature for 64/128/256 colours.

A better solution would probably be to change all the backgrounds to GIF's instead of JPEG, with as few colours as possible- this would reduce the file size of all the backgrounds, fix the renderer (the PNG files would be limited to the same number of colours as the cumulative GIF's used) and ease the drain on your bandwidth somewhat.

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Dinosaurs had eggs bro, the chicken came way later.

Down as of all day.

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"I intend to live forever -- so far, so good."

I managed to break the PNG server today. I hope to have it back up tomorrow. I'm sorry I'm so dumb.

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www.bradsucks.net

We all love you Brad.

PNG rendered should be back up now. Much swearing was done to achieve this.

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www.bradsucks.net

I think the fonts are a little goofy looking on the renders now, I'll look into that soon.

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www.bradsucks.net

You beat me to it. I was just gonnas ask.

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"I intend to live forever -- so far, so good."

I think the fonts should be fixed now.

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www.bradsucks.net

The PNG renderer is not picking up the new background "Matrix" as of the time I discovered this marvelous new BG group.

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"I intend to live forever -- so far, so good."

The PNG-R is still dropping new backgrounds.

Grr. 

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"I intend to live forever -- so far, so good."

I think there was a problem with the category background cache. See if it's any better now.

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www.bradsucks.net

No more "Grr."

 More now like "Prrrr."

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"I intend to live forever -- so far, so good."

BobRogers

What a weirdo.

Am I just having a streak of really bad luck?

The renderer seems to never do anything but time out these past two days.

I was afraid to say anything for fear Crabby would jump my ass. 

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"I intend to live forever -- so far, so good."

BobRogers

You post around here dressed like that and expect me not to jump your ass? You know you wanted it, baby.

Well, when you put it like that...

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"I intend to live forever -- so far, so good."

BobRogers

The renderer server blew up the other week and I had to rebuild it on a new machine so it's likely to be a little weird. It looks like it's stalling for some reason. Let me know if it happens again, I'll put some testing stuff in place.

And if crabby bothers you, just let me know.

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www.bradsucks.net

Thanks Brad. Happy Holidays to everyone.

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"I intend to live forever -- so far, so good."

crabby

What a weirdo.

why are yo so mean to people crabby??

so the png render only for donors? does brad only take paypal for online donation or is there another onlien donate thingie i can use?