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When I browsed the files in Insaniquarium, I found these images:

The first image "smallswim.gif" is sprite animation 1

The second image "smallswim_.gif" is (I think) alpha map 2

So why the developers do that? If to reduce space, Why not just use a PNG image with an alpha channel? Should two GIFs be larger in space?

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    \$\begingroup\$ Lots of possible reasons - but only the devs know for sure. Could be that the engine they used didn't support PNGs, or possibly didn't support alpha channels in imported images for some reason. It could be that the second image is used as a stencil somewhere. It could be that they thought they might use it for something, never did, but also never removed the resource (this happens more often than you might think). \$\endgroup\$ Commented Mar 28 at 17:05
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    \$\begingroup\$ The original Insaniquarium was from 2001 and was made using java; a java history suggests that reading PNG and JPEG (at least via standard library) was added in Feb 2002 ( en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Java_version_history ) \$\endgroup\$ Commented Mar 28 at 21:43
  • \$\begingroup\$ @Yorik Good, but what about the deluxe version? It used popcap games framework (which in used on C++ with DX7). \$\endgroup\$ Commented Mar 29 at 6:32

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