Posted on December 23rd, 2007. Filed under: IT Tags: IT, thoughts —
Be honest: have you ever looked over your own code and felt like you had to redo it? One may think “I can do it so much better now”, but if the deadline is approaching and delivery is due, how many are capable of ignoring the urge to redo without loosing an arm and a leg? Let me rant about the subject.
Posted on December 23rd, 2007. Filed under: Java Tags: image manipulation, JAI —
A while ago I was working on a new feature of a CG project that involved loading hundreds of textures from disk. So far, so good. The images, however, were like an order from the devil: I needed RGBA images, but the images were all in BMP format (no chance for alpha channels) and splitted. How great is that?! To solve this problem, I had two alternatives: the first was joining and converting the images manually. If you consider the ammount of images (422) and the average time to join and convert them (aprox. 3 minutes), that would take more than 21 hours (assuming the bore factor wouldn’t spoil my productivity in the meanwhile). Fortunately, there was a second alternative: automating the whole process. As I could not find a program that could supply my very specific need, I knew I had to make a little program for that, and there came JAI for the rescue.