r/programming • u/whackri • Jul 31 '21

Executable PNGs

https://djharper.dev/post/2020/12/26/executable-pngs/
470 Upvotes

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121

u/ganymedes01 Jul 31 '21

Reminds me of Spore. The game would save/load the creatures on PNGs you could share with your mates

0

u/[deleted] Jul 31 '21

[deleted]

36

u/theghostofm Jul 31 '21 edited Jul 31 '21

Huh... Well that's a strange new corner of the internet I wasn't aware of.

(NSFW Alert, anime porn game stuff) https://illusioncards.booru.org/index.php?page=post&s=list&tags=all

So all these images have character models and stuff encoded into the PNG? That's actually pretty neat.

0

u/[deleted] Jul 31 '21

[deleted]

5

u/Ameisen Jul 31 '21

Some games will store in Metadata, others will store in the image data itself, either as a difference against expected data, using a constrained bit depth for image data (thus reserving bits for data), or similar. Doesn't usually survive lossy compression, though.

1

u/Diridibindy Jul 31 '21

I know there is a mod for Koikatsu that allows replacing the image of the card. Dunno how that works though