Not all is shiny. Great stuff delivered every day. Like serious great stuff. We see a lot more mistakes made these days, but people are delivering amazing pixel art too, every day.
Sulake has a graphics team. They do full image collections on every global campaign. Local teams can just use that. The Spanish hotel, also serving a lot of the Latin-American world, is a busy hotel though.
They need to do a lot of campaigns to keep people happy. So they have a lot going on, always. And they need images to put in their newsarticles.
So, their staff - they seem to have no local graphic guys - fires of some editing tool at times. The problem: they love .jpg. JPG is a compressed image format meant and good for photo’s, with millions of colors, only! It creates fuzzy images when working with pixel art stuff, which Habbo is. Really, really fuzzy images. Ugly images. We’re not sure what happens. They save as .jpg at some point. Then upload as such, or sometimes convert to .gif or .png (both very suitable for pixel art). It still looks like a .jpg though. It is a .jpg, or a worsened .jpg due to the color reduction of the .gif format.
Oh well, just noting. The 4 images shown here are taken from the Spanish site, unedited.
Spanish hotel had a ‘Western’ campaign. Made a group background for it. It contained a paste of a saloon made by a really good Dutch alt artist, Reinout--d. Can Habbo re-use alts ? Yes, they can, especially when it’s totally habbo-based fan-art. Reinout’s work though, is containing some Habbo avatars and has same scale, but for the rest is totally original. Bad choice, Habbo Spain. What is worse though, is they made parts of that background really, really awful. Now Reinout is combined with awful. Maybe this is hard to get across, but that background annoys, majorly.
Before we go point at Spanish staff (only) for awful graphics, badges for Brazilian, French, UK and even Finnish hotel were uploaded as .jpg before. The Finnish one even at the historical size of 100x100 pixels (yes, that will disrupt any badge display). Well, the images had a .gif extension, but Firefox, being an intelligent browser, refused to save them as such, it wanted to save them as .jpg. And that’s what they were. And are, in most cases, as instead of overwriting the original failure, mostly a fixed version with a new name is uploaded. And worse, we feel for the ‘Ducks vs Otters’ winners in UK, who get their badges fixed on their homes, but not inside hotel. Add some anti-aliasing and transparency issues to the mix and we’ve got quite a few ‘whoops’-badges globally.
Yes, the color white is rgb 255 255 255, hexadecimal #FFFFFF and within the actual hotel, the one and only color that will be transparent. Not just for badges, for almost everything; a pre-2000 design choice. So if you give your furniture small version image white borders, they will not be seen. This is partly due to bugs at times, though, at some point(s) in time way more than just white was made transparent (fixed now).