We are considering adding a feature in our app that would render GIFs in a continuous loop. We came across the impack plugin https://marketplace.coronalabs.com/corona-plugins/impack. Is this still being maintained? I also saw in various posts that people have run into performance issues with it. Are the issues still exsting? Many thanks!
Gif is a bit of an old format. The resulting files tend to be quite huge considering their content, and they’re restricted to a 256 colour palette.
Would it not be more logical to use spritemaps?
Makes sense. 80s music came back, 80s yo-yo came back, 80s clothing came back. Why not 80s file formats? 
Hi.
Yes, it’s still maintained, although more on an as-needed basis now. I just added some WebP improvements around the end of this past year.
What were the performance issues? I haven’t heard about any issues with GIFs. I do recall some stability problems when saving files on Android, but that would be unrelated.
Hi StarCrunch - Nothing specific in terms of issues. It’s just that during our research online, it looks like there were still an number issues with the plugin. We’ve purchased the plugin and will give it a test… Many thanks!
GIF as an image format isn’t used very much anymore. The 256 color pallet is just too narrow. However, as an animation format it has only gained in popularity. With sites/services like Giphy and similar and with social media making adding animated images a one button click, they have become extremely popular ways to show emotion beyond emojis and emoticons. Even the latest version of iOS has GIF creation in the camera app through the few times I tied it, I can’t seem to get online services like Facebook to recognize them.
Rob
Yeah, and that’s why we started looking into GIFs. We are considering adding a “messaging” system in our game, where you can message with characters in the game. Being able to support GIFs open up a whole world of options.
FYI we did some quick tests with the plugin on devices, and it seems to work fine. Will post back if we run into issues as we get into actually incorporating it into our project. thx!
That’s pretty interesting Rob. I’m fairly sure animated PNG is a thing these days but I guess they’ve not taken over yet. 2019 seems to be a strange year for tech!
APNG is becoming a little more popular, but there is the whole file size issue. PNG’s are one of the larger compressed image formats because it’s not lossless like JPEG. The files are smaller than TIFF and BMP. GIF’s are considerably smaller at the cost of fewer colors. When you add an animation with many frames, that APNG is going to get quite large. Though I guess if your APNG’s are 8-bit indexed color instead of 24/32-bit RGB the file size would be about the same as a GIF.
Rob
I’ve not played around with PNG animation myself, but generally if you don’t use too many colours, you can get away with some pretty big canvases for static pngs without ending up with a huge file size. As a general rule of thumb in the web development world, it’s slightly lossy jpg for photos, and PNG for illustrations. Gif on the other hand isn’t viable for anything bigger than an icon when filesize is important.
This topic has gotten me thinking though. Since Corona has polygon objects, it shouldn’t be too much work to build in basic SVG support… this might have to become another of my itches to scratch.