Author: Chastity White Rose

I don’t have time to work on this today. When I live alone I’ll probably be able to dedicate 6 hours to my programming each Saturday since I’ll be working a full time job Monday through Friday, however I have some thoughts about how I might be able to design any picture in GIMP or Inkscape containing only black and white and then convert it to my own BBM format.

My programs can already read and write BBM files but because the format was invented by me and no program in the world written by anyone else can convert existing formats into it, this is part of the fun!

It means I alone have to figure out a method to either code my own routine to read an existing format, BMP and PBM are good candidates, or I will have to use ImageMagick and learn how to use the API extremely well so that I can load any image format and then put it into an array in a C or C++ program which can then be used with my existing functions to write it to a BBM file.

So one of these or perhaps even both will be used so I can compare them.

And I should totally include such programs in my book that I’m gonna write.

Things are rough right now as I’m nervous about the new job I start Monday June 3rd but if I can manage that job well and keep it then I will be able to get my own place and schedule programming time on weekends where I can spend many hours writing and fixing functions for the ultimate image formats and sharing what I am learning about computer graphics.

I swear there is nothing more exciting to me than art and creating things. I’ve been moving more into graphics programming instead of designing art in Inkscape partly because there may be money in programming jobs if I become a really awesome programmer.

My art I have already published for sale doesn’t sell enough to live on and that’s why I’m forced to slave away at other jobs instead of spending my life doing what I really want.

I have long agreed with the message of antinatalism with of course the exception of when it is used as a tool to promote abortion.

As my good friend Poffo mentioned in this post, he got a vasectomy to help prevent creating more children without their consent. So be smart like Poffo, or be smart like me and be a virgin for life, or at least until you get sterilized or discover you’re gay.

Not everyone can be a parent but for those who want to, it is better to adopt someone already here rather than insulting them by saying none of them matter because you want a child that shares your genetics.

Here is the link to Poffo’s post on the subject.

https://m.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=10216025931015992&id=1080183868

I promote vasectomy highly for those who actually have sex, because it does reduce the risk of getting someone pregnant but it’s still not a zero risk thing.

https://www.spermcheck.com/vasectomy-blog/vasectomy-failure/

That’s a huge part of the reason I’m so committed to celibacy. It’s the only way to not risk anything. Not just avoiding the risk of pregnancy but also sexually transmitted diseases.

BBM: Binary Bit Map

2 bytes for the width
2 bytes for the height
1 bit per pixel from high to low bits.

Details and History:

I set out to make my own image format because I’m a nerd and because I had my criticisms of existing formats. I haven’t tried them all yet but my main problem with them was that while studying the format specifications and viewing files in my hex editor I kept thinking: “These bytes in the header or the padding at the end of the row have no information which is absolutely required for a program to display the pixels.” I wrote a separate file in which I explained my criticisms of BMP and PBM specifically(“BBM Format Plans.txt”).

My specific goals for this format were:

1. Should be written specifically for easy reading and displaying of the format by a programmer with even a basic understanding of reading binary mode files.(Like me for example)

2. Must support just two colors, black and white, and store 1 bit per pixel.

3. Have the smallest header of any image format. This header contains only the width and height.

One of the major decisions I had to make in this format was which bit order will I use? While I was writing my functions I discovered that the XBM format uses the low to high bits instead of the high to low bits like PBM for the pixel order. What this means is that in the case of the PBM format, in the first byte of the pixel data, the bit representing 128 is the top left pixel. In XBM it is completely opposite and 1 is the first pixel and 128 is the 8th pixel.

Which bit order was used has no practical advantage over the other but the reason that I decided on using the same bit order as PBM was because from a coding perspective, it means I can use left shifts in the process and pretty much copy paste the loop from my PBM writing function.

Programming:

The BBM format evolved out of my Chastity Checker project. The idea was that since I already have a lot of code for writing various formats, I should first write a function which stores the checkerboard into my new format. Then the challenge is to write a separate function which can read the format and either display it to the screen or simply save it into another format. This means that my image format can then be converted to any other existing image format that ever existed by simply converting it to BMP and then using ImageMagick or GIMP to save to any of the formats those programs support.

I’m still in the programming phase but I do believe that I have finished deciding on the details of my image format. From here it’s all just writing tools to process my format and maybe eventually use it in a video game.

In RAM my BBM format is actually loaded into 32 bits per pixel arrays which are allocated and expected to be exactly width*height*4 bytes. This of course means they take 32 times the amount of space that the files do. This is not a problem as long as my programs run on any modern PC although if I needed to, I could totally do a rewrite if I was on a system with limited RAM. The users of any programs I write won’t need to know this but of course it’s an interesting fact and was done for the reason that I may later decide to make a format that supports up to 32 bit ARGB colors. That means the functions will work the same and will never need changing.