Gif Images on SacredWiki

[Schot 407]

After reading about gifs not working so great in the The SX255 story topic(thanx guys!) and some research into the matter, I've come to learn that our wiki software has a long history of problems regarding gifs. Particularly animted gifs. I've done a fair bit of testing with really no success so for the time being I've chosen to set the wiki's thumbnailing function to remove animation frames when creating thumbnails. The full size original will still animate. Just not the thumbnail. What we can do instead is have the thumbnail link directly to the full size animation. You can see how I did that on the Survival Bonus page.

[[File:SBcomparison2.gif|200px|link=http://www.sacredwiki.org/images/b/b9/SBcomparison2.gif]]

So for now... Thumbnails won't be animated. It seems that this has been a problem for Mediawiki for years so I'm guessing this may take a while for me to figure out. Not a priority though I think...

 

There is however a second problem with gifs on the wiki. Flix mentions that problem below:

Flix, on 11 Nov 2013 - 17:26, said:

Something is screwy with other GIFs on the wiki right now, I don't know if it's new or I just never noticed it.

 

Scroll through the Crystal Plane Bestiary to see what I mean. The GIFs are weird looking.

Pictures like the Hucin champ are happening because of the way the gif is being saved. When a gif is saved with the setting "interlaced" on it will result in a malformed thumbnail on our wiki. The only way I know of to avoid this problem for now is to always save gif with the "interlaced" option off. Normally, interlaced is a good idea because it reduces the file size of the image. Unfortunately our wiki isn't handling that option very well...

 

Hopefully I can find an easy solution to these problems. They shouldn't be this big a problem.

[Flix 5,116]

What's bizarre is that neither one of these problems existed until now. I know those Crystal Plane images were fine a few weeks ago.

 

I also know that the animated gifs were also fine a few weeks ago. Now they animate very strangely. Look at the survival bonus page. It's animating way too quick, basically just blinking, but it was fine before.

[SX255 630]

What's bizarre is that neither one of these problems existed until now. I know those Crystal Plane images were fine a few weeks ago.

 

I also know that the animated gifs were also fine a few weeks ago. Now they animate very strangely. Look at the survival bonus page. It's animating way too quick, basically just blinking, but it was fine before.

Oddly enough, if you click on that gif in the wiki, it works fine.

 

So does this mean that my animated fan works wont work with the curent wiki gif situation?

[Schot 407]

Good catch Flix, I saw the survival bonus page glitch too. I think it may have something to do with our most recent update. I know that Knuckles ran into some trouble the very next day after we updated the wiki some time ago. At that time it wasn't clear that it was a gif problem. Only that there was a problem with the thumbnail generator. Now it seems it's gif specific.

 

Both the Crystal Plane Bestiary and survival bonus page are now fixed. Before you can see the correction on those particular pages though you would need to hard refresh your browser by pressing CTRL + F5 or clear your browser history and cache from your browser options.

 

 

It will work SX255. It would just need a bit of link tweaking for the animated ones. Upload your animated work and if you like I'll tweak it for you.

[Schot 407]

Eureka! I finally found a reference that nails down this problem. This was such a tough one to solve because I don't have complete access to our server in all it's abilities. I was stuck with googling and finding just the right search criteria for this matter wasn't an easy task. More to that is that the reference I finally found kinda has an obscure title; Gif manipulation side effect? My search criteria involved words like; mediawiki, ImageMagick, gif, interlaced and a few others like bug, error, problem etc... Took a LOT of searching lemme tell yah. Then I had to learn how to SSH into our server to run some php testing and output the version of ImageMagick that our host has installed on our server to see if our version was within the range of bugged ImageMagick versions. Ours does. So I just need to convince our host to upgrade it. Hopefully that won't be a problem. Oh and for the sake of clarification...

 

This thumbnail generator problem only affects SacredWiki. Not our forum. I guess our forum uses a different method for thumbnailing

• Our SacredWiki's software, Mediawiki, uses "ImageMagick" to render thumbnails
• ImageMagick is a server side app for manipulating images commonly installed by host providers for their client's use
• In Feb 2013 this bug was introduced into ImageMagick with an update
• It appears that this bug exists in versions from 6.8.2-10 to 6.8.3-10 (test case)
• This bug was corrected in version 6.8.4-5 of ImageMagick sometime in March 2013 (solution posted)
• According to a php version script executed on our server; our server's present version of ImageMagick is 6.8.3-9

 

The problem begins when somone saves their picture as a gif image with the interlacing option turned on in whatever image saving program they use. If they upload it to SacredWiki(Mediawiki software) it will upload fine and even the full size image will be fine but any thumbnail version of that gif with interlacing will be corrupt. This is not a problem on our forum but here is an example of what the problem looks like:

 

 

A sample gif image with interlacing:

Sample of what happens to the gif image with interlacing when SacredWiki generates a thumnail of it:

 

Hopefully, when this problem is fixed, the problem we have with animated gifs will also be resolved.

[Dragon Brother 619]

I like seeing all the work you do out in the open Schot. It seems like for so long alot of what you have done has been hidden behind the scenes but lately we have been truly able to appreciate the hard work that you do for us. So thank you!

[gogoblender 3,066]

Schot this has to become a kind of reference guide not just for us but for media wiki and hosting sites. There's a fair number of hours you've put into solving this, great detailed, referenced work, I'm sure many many out there would heartily thank you for finding solution to frustrations being felt on sites everywhere cuz of this.

 

gogo

[Flix 5,116]

It's very inspiring and comforting to wiki-workers to have captains at the helm who know their stuff and are on the ball.

[Schot 407]

Thanx guys! I do like to share this part of what I do but most times, by the time I'm done whatever task I'm working on, I just want to flop down and veg out, lol.

[SX255 630]

And through all your hard work the Fan Art page is now 33 pictures bigger. Here’s hoping others start scribbling their own contributions.

[gogoblender 3,066]

Awesome! lol, I spent time this morning having an amazing laugh over the work. I've always been hoping that more art from the universe would show up, and comics and animation fits the bill perfectly.

Only 33 times bigger though?

 

 

gogo

[Schot 407]

Lookin great SX255! I haven't had a chance to look at them all yet but when I saw "Its not grave robbing" I burst out laughing.

 

Well this has been an interesting discovery which took a turn I wasn't expecting... Our host was kind enough to look into this problem. To my surprise, even his reach does not go far enough to correct this problem and so he is requesting assistance from higher up. From "the cloud". Yes, you heard it right. We actually exist high up upon a coud. Server! Hehe. The cloud people will be taking care of this Gif problem of ours within a week or so. I find this all so very interesting. One of these days I'll set up my own server so I can see how it all works.

[Schot 407]

Well it's been months since this whole thing got started and when last I posted we were waiting for the server techs to fix this problem. So! Is it fixed? Hmmmmm....

[Silver_fox 397]

I saw this topic, but could not find a single glitch on the wiki itself, which is why I proposed to try using GIFs again. I guess, we can just try it out - I'll do the GIF stats for Megalcarwen's set and we'll see how they would look. Also, I remember saving stat GIF with transparency and interlacing turned off - removing transparency makes them a bit smaller and removing interlacing does not really increase filesize for something of 8KB. If you think that interlacing is to blame, turning it off for such images would change filesize only a fraction of KB so it should not really matter.

 

You know, Schot, I played a bit with GIF saving - and for simple images interlace only increases the filesize. That set bonus image I showed you before is 10.13 KB with interlace and 10.01 without. So, I guess, removing interlace might be a way to eliminate the problem. (I'm saving for web in Photoshop, by the way.)

Edited February 9, 2014 by Silver_fox

[Silver_fox 397]

I changed JPGs for GIFs on a couple of set pages and everything looks fine. It appears that GIFs are free to go.

The ones I changed were Equilibrium and http://www.sacredwiki.org/index.php/Sacred_2:Megalcarwen%27s_Garments_of_Mutation

Please check if everything looks OK for you.

[Schot 407]

Ayup! As long as Interlacing is off everything should be ok. Though I do believe the issue of this topic is now resolved. Alternatively, if you're feeling adventurous (ooooooooooh! ), we could use PNG-8 instead of gif. Same abillities as gif, slightly better compression. I'd wager 16 colours would be enough even for stat images.

 

Nicely done on Equilibrium and Megalcarwen's. Noticed the nice job you did on Remnants of Drizzt as well. Regarding our campaign to reduce file sizes it was largely in response to a lot of 1MB+ size images that we had from the old days so don't kill yourself over the stuff under 300kb. It's ol to leave those alone if you'd rather be doing something else. However I'm a fan of optimizing so carry on as you please! ^^ I trust you'll be as particular as I would, haha.

 

Oh and if you happen to stumble across this list of images and then freak out about the sizes like me then don't worry too much about them. They've been optimized but their file sizes aren't being displayed properly. To make sure you can go to whatever pictures page and then use the refesh link from the wiki's left menu. It will update the picture's page with the current file size. I need to find a maintenance script that will update all those...

http://www.sacredwiki.org/index.php5?title=Special:ListFiles&sort=img_size&limit=50&asc=&desc=1&action=purge

[SevPOOTS 90]

So...... Can we upload Gifs of some Combat arts that has variations?

I made a Video Compilation of the seraphim's Assailing Somersault using all different weapons. It would be better if the wiki provided all the animations of it...Which Im glad to help ^^

[Flix 5,116]

So...... Can we upload Gifs of some Combat arts that has variations?

I made a Video Compilation of the seraphim's Assailing Somersault using all different weapons. It would be better if the wiki provided all the animations of it...Which Im glad to help ^^

 

Well, it might be better to keep them as videos and add them to the SacredWiki youtube channel that we use for Sacred 2 videos. Can you upload the files somewhere?

[SevPOOTS 90]

 

So...... Can we upload Gifs of some Combat arts that has variations?

I made a Video Compilation of the seraphim's Assailing Somersault using all different weapons. It would be better if the wiki provided all the animations of it...Which Im glad to help ^^

 

Well, it might be better to keep them as videos and add them to the SacredWiki youtube channel that we use for Sacred 2 videos. Can you upload the files somewhere?

Hmm you mean by uploading the files, are you referring to the gif or the video? I Can upload them in my Wordpress blog if that helps.

I made a video here and it's decent quality enough.

Please mute the audio as I was an anime freak when I made this haha:

[Flix 5,116]

Yeah that's good quality. They're actually better quality than many of the ones we have now. If I'm not mistaken the main videos we have on the combat art pages were made by Mystix, and they look like a recording of a tv screen with the console version playing. Not exactly high definition.

 

My only suggestions are: if you really intend for this to be on the Wiki, remove the copyrighted anime music, and the big text comments like "This is my fav!!"

 

I've made videos for the Wiki independently in the past (on my own channel), and it was requested that instead we have all the SacredWiki videos uploaded to our own SacredWiki channel. Obviously the login info for it isn't public. So I was thinking maybe if we could get the video file itself from you, we could upload it to the Wiki channel. Then you could add it to the pages they belong to (if you're a Wiki member).

 

Gifs aren't a bad idea either, but they'd be directly uploaded to the Wiki, and I'm not sure but I think either quality would suffer or else the Gifs would be too large a size.

 

I can't really make the decision but we can see what the admins think about it.

[SevPOOTS 90]

I think that;s great Well, I Should go Make a New Video then just in case with no Copyrighted Music/Text. Just Plain Raw Sacred 2 Action

[gogoblender 3,066]

I'm on Flix's page with this, and it's a good idea the feedback he gave on the music and captions. Actually having each CA shown expressing itself with each weapon is a fantastic idea.

If you have some good stuff ready for the wiki, We can work on having you get a temp password that you can submit with.

 

 

gogo

[SevPOOTS 90]

I'm on Flix's page with this, and it's a good idea the feedback he gave on the music and captions. Actually having each CA shown expressing itself with each weapon is a fantastic idea.

If you have some good stuff ready for the wiki, We can work on having you get a temp password that you can submit with.

 

 

gogo

Okay then . It settled ! I'll see what I can do im biased towards the seraphim so expect all of my conteibutions revolving around her lol