LiveArea Designer v1.28 (ad0 Fix + High-Fidelity PNG8)

LiveArea Designer v1.28 — ad0 startup-gate fix + much better image quality

This update implements two requests from PS Vita LiveArea designers. It applies to both the web editor and PS Vita homebrew.

1. ad0 has no startup gate

• Exporting ad0 now produces no <gate> element and no <startup-image> reference in template.xml.
• startup.png is no longer included in a freshly exported ad0 ZIP or native asset bundle.
• This follows the extracted firmware RCO metadata, so other genuinely gate-less styles (ad1–ad4, music) also skip the gate.
• The web editor hides the gate-upload widget when the selected style has no gate; switching back to a gate-capable style restores it without deleting any image.

2. High-fidelity PNG8 instead of the harsh fixed palette

• The old 7×8×4 fixed RGB palette was the cause of the severe color shift, not zlib compression itself.
• New image-adaptive 256-color palette on both web and Vita: weighted median-cut selection, palette refinement and mild error diffusion. Logos with 256 or fewer colors retain their original RGB colors exactly (255 with a reserved transparency entry).
• On a synthetic 3-channel gradient, the native quantizer produced about 9% of the old weighted squared color error. Real-artwork results vary; this is not a claim of parity with TinyPNG.
• The PNGs remain non-interlaced, 8-bit palette-indexed and zlib compressed, consistent with PS Vita shell expectations. pic0.png has a full 256-entry palette.
• Vita size constraints are now checked for common restricted files: bg0.png and icon0.png (128 KiB), startup.png (64 KiB), pic0.png (256 KiB). If a file is too large, export first disables dithering while keeping 256 colors; only if necessary does it reduce the palette. The web export reports size-based adjustments. Files that cannot fit fail with a clear message rather than silently producing oversized assets.
• Web PNG filtering now compares adaptive filters vs. filter-0 and uses the smaller lossless result.
• Everything runs locally — no upload to tinypng.com or other service, no API keys and no binary/third-party quantizer dependency.

Known trade-off: PNG8 can represent only 256 palette entries. RGB precision is exact for low-color images, but images with more than 256 colors remain quantized; partial alpha is still thresholded to transparent or opaque.

QA

• 29 Node.js tests passed, including exact-color PNG output, gradient-quality comparison, transparency, file-size fallback, full-palette pic0 and gate-less ad0 XML.
• Native C PNG quantization and XML smoke tests passed (strict warnings); Chrome desktop/mobile E2E passed including full ZIP and VPK import/edit/export checks.
• VitaSDK v1.28 VPK compiled and passed ZIP integrity checks from a clean snapshot of commit a25c810. Unrelated local VPK-import work was not included.
• Final hardware testing of the new exported images and ad0 layout on a real PS Vita is still recommended. The console's currently installed app was not modified by this release process.

Title ID: LIVAREA01.
Web editor · Source repository