Posted May 09, 2025 by Outsider Artisan
So if you didn’t know, I use a CDN to deliver most assets to the web version of Hex, which keeps the game running and loading well despite the massive number of assets the game requires. This ended up being much more expensive than I anticipated. While the traffic will certainly go down over the next few days, the game will only get bigger and hopefully more popular over the coming months and years, so some changes are needed in order to keep the game playable and fun (and possible for me to provide for free).
The web version of the game will be serving WebP format images from now on. You can see a comparison above. WebPs are extremely lightweight and support transparency (an absolute must for our use-case), but are actually designed specifically for photographs and often look rough with artwork that has smooth gradients and sharp lines. However, WebPs are more than 80% smaller than PNGs. While the images on the web version won’t look as good and may have visible artifacts, the savings are just too good to ignore.
The offline browser version will still use PNGs, and the Windows version will also use PNGs and continue to provide an option for 4K PNGs as well. This will create a clear hierarchy for the game’s quality, so I encourage users to use the Windows version if at all possible, then the offline browser version, and finally the web version if that’s their only option.