Seeing Maria again will probably seem like a bit of a throwback to many of you but...
While working on some of the walkthroughs over the past couple of days, and with the recent bandwidth excesses, I was taking a close look at Chapters One and Two.
A couple of people had reported 'freeze ups' whilst playing Chapter Two and I wanted to address this.
Early versions of the games used animated GIF files for any animated sequences.
These tend to be large files with noticeably pixelated images.
Some of the larger animations in Ch2 were exceeding 10mB each, which is a bit of a disaster in terms of causing slow image downloads.
I spent yesterday remaking the animated sequences from the original source files, replacing the large GIF files with individual JPEG image sequences.
I also added one more potential ending to Chapter Two for a bit of extra fun...
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JPEG image sequences are used exclusively from Chapter Nine onwards, and although this method creates many more individual images, it does make for smaller file sizes, higher quality images and smoother animations.
The legacy effect of working on a game for the past eight years means that there are still several GIF files to replace in Chapters Three to Eight.
Any of the newly expanded or fully remade scenes use JPEG image sequences so shouldn't cause any issues.
I intend to work through and replace the remaining GIF files in due course.
It's not a huge job to do, especially as I have all the original source files diligently archived and backed-up.
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dsp3000