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LiveArea Designer v1.31 (Lossless Frame1 PNG)

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@robin994 robin994 released this 18 Oct 10:11
v1.31
abfa361

LiveArea Designer v1.31 - No lossy compression on frame1

Community-requested image quality improvement, implemented in both the Web Editor and native PS Vita application.

Frame1 artwork no longer loses colors

  • frame1.png bypasses PNG8 palette quantization entirely. It is now emitted as 8-bit-per-channel truecolor PNG (RGB 24-bit, or RGBA 32-bit with the Transparent button option).
  • Already compatible, exactly sized PNG files are copied byte for byte. This preserves your uploaded colors, palette, dithering and alpha rather than re-encoding the file.
  • Images that need resizing, JPG decoding or compositing are exported as lossless truecolor RGB/RGBA PNG, never reduced to 256 colors.
  • Only frame1 is affected. Frame2 onward, the gate, background, icon and bootscreen keep their optimized indexed PNG8 behavior.
  • The web editor labels the selected frame1's lossless behavior and warns when the generated frame1 PNG exceeds 384 KiB.
  • The XML layout, frame1 default psla:eboot target, ad0 gate handling, and VPK editing remain unchanged.

Important format details

PNG files always use lossless zlib/DEFLATE compression internally. This release removes lossy palette conversion, not PNG's mandatory, pixel-perfect compression.

Experimental hardware compatibility: inspection of stock Sony firmware found 8-bit RGBA LiveArea artwork, but full-color PNG support and size limits for every homebrew LiveArea frame are not yet verified. Very large RGB/RGBA files may fail to render or be rejected when installed. Validate on a real Vita before distributing VPKs with large frame1 images. No automatic fallback to PNG8 is applied to frame1 because that would defeat the purpose of this request.

Quality checks

  • The previously supplied 840x500 source artwork with 190,449 unique colors exports as a 516,083-byte RGB PNG with zero changed pixels (lossless).
  • 33 Node.js tests passed, including truecolor RGB/RGBA and alpha preservation.
  • Native C PNG encoder and byte-for-byte PNG pass-through smoke tests passed.
  • Chrome desktop/mobile browser tests passed, including a frame1 unchanged-PNG ZIP export, RGB resize and unchanged indexed frame2 output, plus VPK patching tests.
  • VitaSDK release VPK compiled from clean commit abfa361, ZIP integrity and SHA-256 validated. Unrelated local VPK editor changes were not included.

Title ID: LIVAREA01.
Web editor | Source repository

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