[LordZen]

Yes that was the reason, but it is still good practice to use PNG. And Graal offers a useful tool to allow you to easily do that.

Even though that patent expired in the USA, its enforced in many other countries where Graal is used (Germany, France, Canada, Britain). Those are supposed to expire this summer.

Couple of things:

GIF format is limited to 8-bit, which is only 256 colors. The format was developed in the 80's back when most monitors could support only that many colors. PNG was developed in the mid 90's and has support for up to 64-bit. That usually isnt a big deal for gfx in this game but some people like to use tons of unessisary colors when using effects and stuff with psp or whatever.

PNG can be about 1/5 smaller in filesize compared to a similiar image saved in GIF format.

PNG also has the ability to adjust gamma depending on how its being viewed on the monitor, so it can be viewed as it was originally intended as long as the program reading it knows to check the gamma value. Otherwise it might look brighter or darker on other monitors if settings are not similar.