what's up with square files?

I was just thinking, I was looking at someone's pic thing that we all get, the avatar, and i noticed they've got little notches on the four corners, so it's kinda like so:

Code:

---

  __________
  /          \
 /            \
|            |
|            |
|            |
|            |
|            |
 \            /
  \__________/

---

-finally got those dang dimensions right, i hate these stupid spaces...

and you see all that extra space there? imagine the picture was blown up a couple 1000 times, and those white spaces would then take up a LOT of space.

Well, just a thought, I wonder if in the future if we will ever have "amorpheus" files. For instance, the file above wouldn't be a block, it would actually be molded around the data, and the blank space wouldn't be anything.......

say you had a picture of a diamond with a corner in the middle of each side, with the normal file system, you'd have to waste ALL that space in the corners for nothing, whereas in the amorpheus system, it would just mold itself around the file's data, saving twice as much space almost!

just my two cents....

many picture formats already have transparent blitting

I believe his point was, if you have a picture of a triangle, half of the picture contains the graphics and the other half is transparent, but still uses space in the bitmap. If a new filesystem was invented that, somehow, only stores the graphics data and not the transparent parts, you could save some filesize.

one way would be to include the co ordinates of every pixel in its block

Code:

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Color    Co Ordinates
04h 08h  01h 00h 01h 00h

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but that would actually take up a lot more space than a bitmap. Another way, and perhaps the best way, would be to include some kind of shape definition in the header of the file.

Try looking up vector graphics on google.

Quote:

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Another way, and perhaps the best way, would be to include some kind of shape definition in the header of the file.

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But that would only work with a predefined set of shapes. Anyway, with memory/storage so plentiful, we don't need to worry too much about wasted data.

It's still a cool idea.

>>> with memory/storage so plentiful, we don't need to worry too much about wasted data.

I think the important point is not local storage, but bandwidth during transmission. Poor example I agree, (I wouldn't send such a thing as a bitmap), but assume I want to send you a bitmap which is 100x100 and contains one blue pixel, and the rest are transparent.

>>assume I want to send you a bitmap which is 100x100 and contains one blue pixel, and the rest are transparent.

Here you go. Photoshop compressed it down to 158 bytes. :p

>>>Poor example I agree, (I wouldn't send such a thing as a bitmap), but assume

... yawn.