Icon Engine 1.02 Proposed Changes
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Published
Friday, January 16, 2004
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4:47 AM
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Having working with the Icon Engine and Icon Format all week, I am seeing areas for improvement. Here are the proposed changes for version 1.02 of the format and engine.\0
Proposed changes to Icon Engine:
1. Change CLUT limit from 26 colors to unlimited color values.
2. Improve performance and simplify engine design.
3. Add Header to support Meta Data within Icons like Author, Created, Modified, Copyright, Company.
The biggest of these is the CLUT changes as these imply moving from the Alpha mapping to a numeric mapping. We are also looking to add a delimiters to the pixel Block values to speed processing and enable future format additions in a structured manner. The key weakness in the format is runtime processing, anything we can do to make the Icon Engine faster is worth the time and effort. Ideally, Icons of various sizes should be easy to render and burden the player minimally. The shift from Alpha to numeric color values makes processing much faster as colors are referenced directly vs calculated from an Alpha value.
The header addition is also very important as it allows metadata to be added into the icon. This is especially true in regard to copyrights and author credits. This will also make the icons portable allowing IconExplorer, Icon Professional or other Icons IDEs or tools to read and display this critical information.
Special thanks to Mario Klingemann for so eloquently voicing his issues with the format. I am especially encouraged that many in the Flash community are embracing the format. I am hopeful that we can establish an open standard for icons for the Flash platform.
Please voice your concerns about the format changes in the comments here. Icon Engine will formally moved to version 1.02 next week along with a new release of Icon explorer and the included icons. I will also be releasing a free tool to convert your icons from 1.01 to 1.02 and add header information.
Cheers,
ted ;)
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