From: Evert Glebbeek <eglebbk@xxxxxxxxxx>
Reply-To: alleg-developers@xxxxxxxxxx
To: alleg-developers@xxxxxxxxxx
Subject: Re: [AD] GIF patent / support
Date: Wed, 3 Mar 2004 09:17:58 +0100
On Wednesday 03 March 2004 01:04, Jason Winnebeck wrote:
> Actually, by that argument, I'd much rather see PNG support from Allegro
> than GIF. PNG provides as good compression as GIF (sometimes a lil
more,
> sometimes a lil less), but PNG supports bit depths other than 8 bit, and
> PNG supports alpha channels. It is as good as TGA in expressive power
and
> is decently supported across editors, and it provides good compression.
The problem is that to decode a PNG, Allegro needs to eithe require the
libraries libpng and zlib to be installed, or it needs to implement the
nescessary code from those libraries itself.
I don't really like Allegro picking up any more dependencies than it has to
and from a code standpoint, reinventing th wheel is undesirable as well.
Besides, there is Peter's PNG library which works quite well with Allegro.
Perhaps this could be linked from the Allegro download page as a useful
addon to have, but I would not suggest that it be merged with Allegro.
Evert