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Showing posts from September, 2017

Compressing PNG images recursively with pngquant

Do you have a large amount of PNG images and need to reduce the file sizes? Try pngquant , it's great! Especially for mobile apps and games it's really important to keep the final download size down. This because you can't rely on people around the globe having access to high-speed Internet connections and unlimited amounts of free mobile data. In it's simplest form you can just run the following command to compress all the PNG images in the current working directory: $ pngquant 256 *.png One "problem" with this command is that it creates new image files instead of overwriting the existing ones. This might be nice sometimes, but is usually not what you want. To overwrite your files, just add the --ext and --force options like this: $ pngquant --ext .png --force 256 *.png Ok, that's nice, but what if you have your images structured in a directory tree? Going into each directory to run pngquant can quickly become a tiring task if you have

Creating animated GIFs on Windows the easy way

As a game developer you often want to show off parts of your work, for example on Twitter or Facebook. Sometimes plain images are enough, but other times you might have a cool game sequence that requires animation to come alive and get the proper attention. You could record video clips and share them with your followers on YouTube etcetera, but most of the times you're probably better off by just creating an animated GIF instead. Creating animated GIFs is of course nothing new, and not only useful to game devs. From my experience it's an excellent way to quickly demonstrate new features and ideas no matter what you're developing, without the need to have a working prototype. It took me a while to find my favorite tools that allow me to create GIFs of decent quality quickly and without hassle. Which tool to use depends on what you need to do. Basically, there are two different scenarios where animated GIFs come in handy. 1. Record an actual video sequence (e.g. gamepla

React Native v0.44 - Unable to resolve module react/lib/ReactComponentTreeHook

I have this app built with React Native v0.44. The current version is 0.48 but I haven't had time to upgrade during the summer, and when I tried to do so I got all kinds of weird dependency errors so I decided to stick with 0.44 for a little while longer. Yesterday I bought myself a new Macbook to finally put my old choking Macbook Air from 2012 out of its misery. I cloned my git repo, ran npm install, but when I tried to launch the app in the iOS simulator it stopped with the following error: Unable to resolve module ReactComponentTreeHook from node_modules/react-native/Libraries/Performance/Systrace.js I tried to clean up and reinstall a couple of times since that usually solves quite of lot of dependency errors, but this error persisted and I had no clue what was causing it. After searching the Internet for a little while I found this page presenting a couple of possible solutions worth trying . The first solution suggests using react-native-git-upgrade, and that's t