Are you sick of the boring png, gif, and jpg file formats? Ever tried opening one in Notepad to get out some text for a puzzle cache, and been aghast at its messiness? Well, Chudles Graphic Format (cgf) is the solution for you!
Some of the initial feedback has been slightly discouraging though:
Bill Gates "What an awesomely inefficent format! For all but the most trivial of cases, it has the distinction of producing files sizes larger than a bmp!"
Linus Torvalds "Why would you bother, any vendor would be mad to support it"
Kim Kardashian "I love it. Look at all those pretty pictures"
Luckily, I am not easily discouraged, so am ploughing ahead with my attempt to get this to become a world wide standard. So how does it work?
The main concept is that a 0 is used as a delimiter between each section. First comes the Version (because others are sure to build on my work). Then image width, image height, number of colours, colours (palette), and then the image. The first step with the image is to specify the colour (from the palette) and then the number of dots in a row of that colour. Then a zero, the next colour from the palette, a zero, and the number of pixels. The colour can wrap around from one line to the next and keep going.
Colours are in hexadecimal, but the rest of the format is in plain old decimal.
The best way is via example.
Here's an extract from a sample file:
103000200030FFFF000F0222202071960104703023302044.....
| 1 0 |
Version is 1 |
| 300 0 |
Image Width is 300 pixels |
| 200 0 |
Image Height is 200 pixels |
| 3 0 |
There are 3 colours |
| FFFF00 0 |
The first colour is FFFF00 (yellow) |
| F02222 0 |
The second colour is F02222 (a red) |
| 207196 0 |
The third colour is 207196 (a blue) |
| 104703023302044 ... |
This is the image |
Then breaking the image part of 104703023302044 down:
| 1 0 |
Select Colour One |
| 47 0 |
Draw 47 pixels |
| 3 0 |
Select Colour Three |
| 233 0 |
Draw 233 pixels |
| 2 0 |
Select Colour Two |
| 44 0 |
Draw 44 pixels |
And here's the file that will give you the cache's co-ordinates:
1015023050FFFFFF08DB4E30FFFF000FF000007030A001017020301060301010404010103020101040501010902010
1040501010902010101030101010301010805020102030101010404010703010101030101010201010302010106030101010
501010102010103030101020301010303010101050101010201010303010103040301020501010203030109050101090
203010110201010303010107040101020201010303010102030301020201010202010103050101010301010302010
10102010102020101030501010103010103020101010201010202010103050101050201010102010103030301050
401010202010101004010103040101030401010504010107040103010401010302010109040101040201050401018
Now for the terrain part of the cache. Once you've worked out the co-ordinates you will either need to paddle, and then climb a distance up a hill (so bring decent shoes). Or my preferred route is to walk from the carpark at the cache's supplied co-ordinates. The track will take you across two bridges to where you will have to cross a waist high creek (S +0.035 E +0.027), skirt around some more water, and then climb the same hill. Either way, I rated it a 4.26t trek (which I had to round up :) ), in a beautiful area. On the day I put out the cache there was a light, misty rain. I felt a million miles from anywhere.
GPS accuracy is poor at GZ, and as I don't want you to miss out on finding the cache, I've attached a couple of somewhat spoiler photos
Thanks to Yurt for telling me how to find the National Park's boundaries, so that I didn't stray inside
You really shouldn't need the checker, but just to give you that warm fuzzy feeling, here is the link GeoChecker.com.
