The APNG project was suggested by Glacies in May 2014
We got a greenlight from staff to do it, and I was particularly enthusiastic due to aura overworld animations, which have a ton of information the in-game tooltip rotations don't. So the project gradually built up from there. But I fear it simply cannot be maintained. Here are a few reasons why:
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Reasons to stop:
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1) Too time consuming
Explanation: It's a lot of time-consuming work, even if you know what you're doing. The average overworld animation I do takes 15 minutes if done in a single sitting. This demands various program commands and attention to detail, and if every step is done perfectly, I can only get it down to around 8 minutes. Multiply those minutes by hundreds of items.
2) Too difficult to do
Explanation: Many editors who try can't get it to work correctly, even though an outline was graciously provided by ThePC in the style guide. Computers are very picky... each step can have one mistake that messes up the end result (here's a funny one that was promptly fixed, we call it "caffeine hammer"). Even the most intelligent and patient of editors must frequently face these frustrations.
3) Most files are too big
Explanation: The "overworld" of SK has a lot less color-tolerance information than tooltips. I won't go too deeply into this, but bottom of the line, most full tooltip rotations are just too big for the wiki's file size limit. We have discussed trying to increase this ceiling to no avail. Thus we have "framey issues" and/or "pixel fuzz" for several tooltips, and for items that have a larger cycle of rotation within the tooltip, a perfect loop is simply out of the question. Which brings up the issue: if the point is quality but we can't upload quality, then there is no point.
When the project first started, I fooled around to try and get gifs to work, but that is a comparatively very low quality format that I personally despise, and Equinox stated we shouldn't use them anyway, at least not for representative images. That being said, staff uses .gif, and I've had to use gif for extensive weapon demonstrations (because again, the APNG file size is just too big). This is getting away from the tooltip issue, though. We will definitely keep trying to upload overworld animations, they are way easier and tend to be a lot smaller than tooltips. They are also clearly appreciated, which brings me to my next point:
4) They were met with enthusiasm, but they don't seem to be actively used
Explanation: Many tooltips have been on display for accessory and costume pages. They don't have many views at all - less than 50 for most of them, and many of these hits are me checking tags etc. This is vs. hundreds of views for overworld animations that have been up for around the same amount of time. This indicates that either users don't care for the animation, or they get the information they want from a glance. I doubt they don't know it's an animation (because the caption clearly states it is, and no, we don't want to display moving images on pages, this greatly increases loadtime and is horribly distracting).
5) They were met with enthusiasm, but when it comes to the work, it's not happening
Explanation: it's easy to want something this nice when others do the work. The lovely editors who did most of the tooltip animations have quit, choosing (and rightfully, logically so) to deal with real life and enjoy other hobbies. This means I'm the only one left to do these animations, and I don't want to do them when there seems to be so little gain for so much effort (and with so much loneliness).
6) Many people can't see them anyway.
Explanation: browser compatibility.
7) The game could update and render all this hard work partially or completely obsolete. This has already happened to a degree. We didn't even have tooltips before, and in Feb 2014 they zoomed the tooltip view of the armor accessory out, not mentioning this huge change in the release notes.
8) The internet/wiki could update to have a phenomenally better option. JUST LOOK AT THIS INTERACTIVE WEAPON DISPLAY ON THE TF2 WIKI. LOOK AT IT.
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Plan of action:
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1) Replace the tooltip animations in various galleries around the wiki with "equipped-2" visuals. Players can still see another angle of an item (usually the back). We did equipped-2 in the past for this reason. I stopped uploading them for two reasons. 1, we started the APNG project. 2, it was absolutely ridiculous to upload an equipped-2 image for every color variant of an item. I wouldn't mind doing this for just one representative of all items of a type, as a regular pic instead of an APNG. That takes roughly 1 minute of relatively mindless cropping, vs. 15-20+ minutes of frustration for the same "at a glance" information.
This also lets more editors contribute. Again, tooltip APNGs are just too hard and/or time consuming for most editors. Cropping a PNG is not.
2) Keep the APNGs we have. The category containing these APNGs can still be a great source of information. There's no need to request that staff deletes the APNGs as far as I know, despite their large size.
3) We plan on eventually using the weapon APNGs on weapon pages, as soon as we have basic and charge attack animations. As you can imagine, this takes time to do. And doing an APNG for a weapon isn't a tall order, because SK rarely releases new equipment (even reskins), compared to the plethora of aesthetics.
4) APNGs are not under fire here, just tooltip animations. We will continue to do overworld, as these have many page hits (especially auras) and I have received a lot of positive feedback about them, vs. very little for tooltips.
Conclusion:
We can hope one day OOO implements some sort of massive Master Archive where players new and old-returning can go look at every possible arsenal item. One of the core reasons for the tooltip project was to show an item to anyone who wanted to see it and didn't know how to use Spiral Spy - good luck finding rare items on the AH months or years after the only promo that ever had them has ended, if you get the "picture." Ha. Ha. Get it? Picture? Visual...yeah. :(
Please consider this post an announcement, unless someone willing to do the tooltips shows up or returns, the plan of action will be put in place. Even then I would encourage whomever volunteers to not do that, because you will find yourself in a very, very deep hole. This respects the work that has been done, while saving an unfathomable amount of work as time goes on.
Thanks for not giving up, Hennils.