51–60 of 210 posts
IFF (or IFF-based formats) is a lot more widely used than some realize, just not usually with ILBM content nowadays. Microsoft RIFF (largely WAV and AVI, although animated Windows cursors also use RIFF), Apple's AIFF audio, Maya uses an IFF variant for raster image data, and even The Sims uses an IFF variant for many of its data files.
Tiff is very much not dead. It is likely one of the image formats more widely used today. Terabytes of new tiff images are prodced every hour and distributed by many remote sensing operators. It is a really flexible and robust format also. How else are you going to store a floating-point multispectral image of 8 bands and 50.000 x 50.000 pixels, arranged tile-wise for easy cropping?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
BMP and TGA have the advantage that they're uncompressed, so it's mostly trivial to dump the contents of your framebuffer to a file without any major dependencies.
You can write an uncompressed PNG IIRC.
You can write out PNG files with deflate blocks that aren't compressed, so in that sense they are uncompressed PNG files, but all of the complexity of supporting compression is still there in the data format in a way that is not fully avoidable even if you don't actually compress the data.
BMPs on the other hand are simple to write, only a very small portion of the header data is required and then you can dump the image out as its raw pixel data in a way that they are probably already being stored in memory, making it a very easy format to support the writing of and a pretty easy format to support the reading of.
Hmm; Tiff is still the default universally-readable format for many lossless purposes. It also seems to be used automatically in places: e.g. in Lightroom, clicking "External Editor" sends a TIF file to the external editor and imports it back by default. I thought it was also used in some scientific/analysis scenarios as well. I thought I also saw BMP in a lot of games for some reasons (not to mention it's default ou…
GeoTIFF is an interesting extension of TIFF that seems to serve a niche that other image formats cannot. It doesn't have the compression of say WebP or PNG, but the fact that it can have rich geographical metadata (projection, coordinates, etc.) makes it incredibly useful for GIS applications.
[0]: https://gdal.org/drivers/raster/cog.html#general-creation-op...
Wasn't VRML support in browsers usually plugins and not native?
I would create the files in a txt editor and then explore the world-space created via browser.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think bitmaps are often used in 2d games for level definition or various other sorts of mapping (height, for 2.5d games, et c.)
Bitmap is the easiest image file format in the world to read/write and the easiest and sometimes fastest to shoot over to any video device in the history of computing. Almost every game making tutorial going back to the 80s has "how to read/write" bitmaps usually in it somewhere. Even 3D games will sometimes use them in a lot of odd places because it was faster/easier/took fewer cycles to include an uncompressed or s…
Each place had a similar hyperlink object to get back to the Parthenon.
I enjoyed it. I probably still have the VRML 2.0 book around somewhere.
Tiff is very much not dead. It is likely one of the image formats more widely used today. Terabytes of new tiff images are prodced every hour and distributed by many remote sensing operators. It is a really flexible and robust format also. How else are you going to store a floating-point multispectral image of 8 bands and 50.000 x 50.000 pixels, arranged tile-wise for easy cropping?
For quite some time TIFF was the default format for screenshots on OS X, which was probably one of its more prominent uses by the general public. During that period it was also pretty common for developers to use TIFF for application assets like toolbar icons and splash screens. At some point that all shifted over to PNG, but macOS support for TIFF remains good to this day.
Source: NeXTStep ;-)
JPEG2000 is a big one that seems to be missing. It is used in medical imaging or something, because laws? But its visual quality is worse than old JPEG, despite a PSNR advantage. Apparently, compression researchers used to think that people care about PSNR.