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First, I'd like to say hullo and thanks for hosting this site! I'm excited about getting into sprites with the charaset generator.Which brings me to a question: I see Charas.EX hasn't been updated in forever. I grabbed the latest and was disappointed to see that I couldn't update the art from beyond 2011 or thereabouts. Alas, such things happen when updated by volunteers. So I started trying to look at the format to see if I could maybe do a screen-scrape and then feed it back in. However, I noticed that everything was in a proprietary CMR format. After digging in the source code (woohoo! ...Purebasic? first time I've seen that...) the actual internal format looks not too hard (but I don't understand all the fields quite yet), BUT additionally PureBasic does this "OpenPack" thing such that the actual data appears to be compressed using some PureBasic specific format... makes it harder to work with. Out of this I have a couple questions:-How were the original updates made? Did they use some internal format not available for download from this site? The CMR format made me wonder; I would definitely be curious in getting to the raw data.-Is it possible for a new update to get created? It doesn't look like the maintainers are active for the Charas.EX project so I'm not hopeful.And/or a really crazy idea:In general I'm trying to think about the curation of the data here. You guys have a really good library here and I'd hate to see it ever go down with the site if it ever stops being hosted. Right now the logic all lives in PHP server-side and images are fetched one-by-one (which may be part of the whole server load issue). I did a rough screen scrape today and it looks like the whole works of Charas (for the charasets) is something less than 1.5MB (does that sound about right?). Since the hosting of this site started, HTML Canvas has really taken off and I wonder if it wouldn't be possible to 1) push the resources into a single heavy pack and 2) do all processing in JS...Whew...! That was a whole load of crazy ideas. Thoughts?
Well, can anybody tell me what the "raw" backend format is and how to get the data? I get the feeling from Charas.EX that it's not just the PNG but a couple other details, and that's (maybe?) how they made the updates... Otherwise the best shot I've got is a screen scrape of the pngs vs. the transparent pngs to mask out the background to try to get CMRs created... Yikes! Any nuggets 'o info would be greatly appreciated....now to navigate the forum post purgatory of captcha!
And Momeka, do I understand you to mean that upload's broken for everyone? I couldn't log in to the Charas generator, let alone upload, but I wasn't just sure if it was me...
...now to navigate the forum post purgatory of captcha!
I dunno. Just not sure where to go from here from a community-sharing perspective. Keep in mind I'm a bit of a noob to this stuff... But Fisherson, I sure can ship you what I've got at some point if you're curious; my original estimate was wrong and it's about 11MB.