Room reseeding

Seeding room colors by uploading an image with the colors you want should be easy, yet many consider it somewhat of a black art. What if you run out of tiles of a certain colors? A new feature makes it easy to reseed the colors of a room, down to very exact tile.

In the past, changing a seeding image in an image application such as Photoshop was at best a hit or miss situation. Well, this has now come to an end. A new feature allows you to recreate a seeding image that has exactly 1000 pixels, with one pixel for each tile.

The image that is being created by that new feature is very small, since it takes only 40×25 pixels to represent 1000 pixels. You can now load this image into your favorite image editing software and change the color of any one pixel. Zooming in may help to achieve that.

Simply reseed your room with your adapted tiny seeding image (see how fast it is if you use a small image?), and there we go… every pixel in this image represents exactly 1 tile.

Don’t worry about this 40×25 image to be a very distorted version of the image you originally used. The width and height of this image is probably not that same as the original image, but that doesn’t matter - when seeding, what really happens is this:

The image that you load is firstly resized so it has approximately 1000 pixels, or any value close enough to that. This means that if you’ve been uploading large image files, you’ve been doing yourself no favor - it just takes a very long time to upload that image and then to resize it. My tip is: Resize any image that you upload for seeding so that the largest edge is only 60 pixels or less. Yep, that tiny, since the image seeding algorithm is going to discard any extra pixels anyway.

So - upon recreating the seeding image, 40×25 dimensions are enforced. That’s probably not only the wrong aspect ratio but the image may look terribly distorted or skewed. Once again - this doesn’t matter. When seeding, TheBroth will look at one pixel after the other, row by row, column by column, and just use each pixel color for one tile color. I hope this makes sense.

So, where’s that tool? Well for now it is here: http://www.thebroth.com/seedingcolors.html?room=members

Replace “members” with your own room name or any other room that you have access to. It’s not possible to get to the seeding image of password protected rooms.

Now, that’s not a bad feature, but in addition we also added the ability to upload not only JPG, but also PNG and GIF files. For example, the little image that is being created by this tool is a PNG file. When using this new feature, make sure you save the image in the same PNG format, and not in JPG format - otherwise you may get unexpected results (JPG features a “lossy” compression scheme).