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LiveArea Designer v1.29 (Sharper PNG8 Export)

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@robin994 robin994 released this 18 Oct 00:09
· 2 commits to main since this release
v1.29
ff12e9c

LiveArea Designer v1.29 — improved PNG8 visual fidelity

This release addresses visible image-quality loss in complex artwork containing soft shadows, lighting effects and gradients. It updates both the browser editor and PS Vita native application; VPK patching and LiveArea layout handling remain unchanged.

What changed

  • Replaced the coarse color lookup in v1.28 with full-precision pixel matching against the four closest colors from a finer RGB6 palette neighborhood.
  • Palette colors now undergo eight refinement passes using the actual image distribution instead of rounding away useful shades in the initial RGB5 histogram.
  • Uses subtler dithering (0.15) by default, gradually reducing to 0.10, 0.05 and 0.00 only when the image is too large. The palette remains at 256 colors until the quality-preserving size adjustments are exhausted.
  • The web editor caches the refined palette across dithering attempts, avoiding expensive repeated palette searches.
  • All output remains non-interlaced 8-bit indexed PNG + lossless DEFLATE, respecting conservative Vita resource size limits.

Real-artwork test

Using user-supplied 840x500 source artwork containing approximately 190,449 distinct RGB colors, our older v1.28 exporter produced a 127,169-byte PNG with mean squared RGB error 28.37 (33.60 dB PSNR). The new exporter produced a 128,401-byte PNG with error 21.99 (34.71 dB PSNR), a measured 22.5% reduction in error while remaining under the 128 KiB bg0 limit.

Important limitations: PNG8 offers at most 256 distinct RGB colors, so the source with 190,000+ colors cannot be preserved losslessly. More detailed artwork will still have some gradients/banding, and different artwork can produce different results. We are improving visual fidelity within confirmed Vita-oriented PNG8 restrictions, not switching to an unverified 24/32-bit format. The submitted copyrighted artwork used to benchmark this release is not part of this repository or VPK.

Quality assurance

  • 30 Node.js unit tests passed, including palette reuse, image fidelity, size fallback, alpha/PNG8 validity and ad0 gate-less XML.
  • Native C exporter, template-preview, settings, and quantization tests passed.
  • Chrome desktop/mobile integration suite passed, including per-frame assets, VPK patching and ZIP export.
  • VitaSDK VPK built from clean commit ff12e9c, checked for ZIP integrity and verified against its SHA-256 checksum. Unrelated local changes were not included.
  • Final visual inspection on real PS Vita LiveArea is still needed. The console's installed app was not updated automatically.

Title ID: LIVAREA01.
Web editor | Source

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