LiveArea Designer v1.30 (Preserve TinyPNG Quality)

LiveArea Designer v1.30 — Exact PNG8 quality preservation

This update fixes another reported LiveArea background quality issue in both the web editor and PS Vita homebrew.

What changed

• Removed the artificial 128 KiB limit for bg0.png. Read-only inspection of a real retail PS Vita's stock vs0: firmware assets found valid Sony 840×500 PNG8 backgrounds up to 369,340 bytes, far above the old 128 KiB cap. The new editor allows 384 KiB for the indexed LiveArea card background — a conservative envelope based on observed Sony data, not a universal documented maximum.
• Existing optimized PNG8 backgrounds are preserved byte-for-byte, without unnecessary palette rebuilding, when they are opaque, noninterlaced, 840×500 pixels and fit the observed size envelope. This is supported on both the web and native Vita editors.
• RGB sources with 256 or fewer unique colors are preserved without any RGB color loss when converted to PNG8. A user-provided TinyPNG comparison image (840×500, 256 colors) passed through the new real web encoder with 0 changed RGB pixels, resulting in a 157,447-byte PNG8 — below the updated background limit.
• For photographic/high-color input, PNG8 still requires quantization. The default now prioritizes visual quality (dithering 0.50), with lower dithering and fewer colors only when needed to meet the correct per-asset limit. The original comparison sample yields a 152,536-byte PNG8.
• startup.png, icon0.png and pic0.png retain their conservative size limits until their larger variants are tested on actual Vita hardware.
• No network upload to TinyPNG and no external API key. The user-supplied copyrighted artwork used to validate pixel identity is not packaged in this repo or release.

Limitations: This is not a claim that our quantizer produces the same palette as TinyPNG for an arbitrary 24-bit photographic source. PNG8 still has at most 256 colors, and further visual differences can occur for high-color originals. If you already have an optimized PNG8, import it directly to get identical output. The larger bg0 tolerance is supported by actual stock firmware samples, but exporting a new third-party package with large artwork should still be tested on the physical console.

QA

• 30 Node.js unit tests passed, including a >128 KiB PNG8 that retains all 256 colors.
• Native C tests passed, including byte-for-byte PNG8 copy, binary identity when source is the destination, and template XML/settings smoke tests.
• Chrome desktop/mobile integration passed, including source PNG8 exact reuse, VPK patch/import/export and ZIP assets.
• VitaSDK VPK compiled successfully from clean commit 9d31dfb, ZIP integrity checked. No unrelated local code changes were bundled.
• Console's installed LiveArea Designer was not changed automatically by this release.

Title ID: LIVAREA01
Web editor | Source