Benefits of PNG support

• Transparent ships: PNG has transparency, but JPEG does not.
• No more masks: again, PNG has transparency
• Better image quality: PNG does not use lossy image compression

It's also helpful that PNGs are a much more modern workflow than using bitmasks. This makes making graphics more accessible to newcomers.

What happened to my old PNG support ticket?

Also smaller filesizes for ships with proper transparency (no ugly aliasing artifacts on borders either)

I found a really small and easy to integrate PNG library, so I think this will be possible in 1.8 Beta 2. See: http://lodev.org/lodepng/

 …This means I am going to have to re-render everything in TBR — again — to include an alpha channel, and I am sooo okay with that… ^.^

YAYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I'm rerendering everything in blender anyways (going slow due to having to remake all of the materials), so this works out perfectly

Implemented in 1.8 Beta 2.

NOTE: Remember that PNG does not compress as much as JPEG (because JPEG is lossy). You may see larger TDB sizes, so please test before you covert everything.

If this ends up being a big problem, we might add a switch to TransCompiler to covert PNGs back to JPEG. This might give us the best of all worlds (easy to develop, but small file sizes).

uncompressed file sizes will be smaller however (for anyone like a certain TSB developer who is using 8-bit bmp masks) because now the alpha map is being properly compressed!

I think the 'png to jpg' should probably be done on-download perhaps (the toggle would be at least, like, subscribe to high or low quality version or something - the recompute would only happen once on the server)? so people with limited drive space or limited bandwidth can use lower quality graphics but less filespace/bandwidth than the png version, while people who can make use of that will be able to enjoy the losslessly compressed sprites.