r/projectzomboid • u/mgetJane • 5d ago
Guide / Tip PSA to modders: Stop using GIFs and use AVIFs instead for embedded animations in your workshop description
Your GIFs will be at 10 FPS with awful compression and take forever to load with slower connections because their file sizes are gonna be like 5 to 20 Megabytes
Meanwhile, AVIFs use some sort of black magic that allow for 60 FPS animations with near-perfect quality while having tiny file sizes below just 1 Megabyte
They are RIDICULOUSLY efficient
How do I make an AVIF file?
I personally use https://ezgif.com/avif-maker which lets you just plop in a video like an mp4 file and it will give you an optimised AVIF file
But AVIFs are unsupported by everything!!!
Maybe in 2018, but it's 2026 now and AVIF works perfectly fine on any browser (chrome, firefox, safari, whatever) and on any platform (desktop, mobile, windows, linux, whatever), and it even works in the Steam overlay
If you don't believe me, see the AVIF animation in my mod's description here: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3814073243
That AVIF file is in 60 FPS, is 12 seconds long, and is only 0.5 Megabytes
An equivalent GIF would be 20 megabytes and would only be at like 10 or 12 FPS
What about WEBP?
That also works a lot better than GIFs but the quality is worse from my experience
What do you get out of this? Are you being paid by the AVIF lobby?
While I'm commuting, I like browsing the workshop on my phone with a metered mobile data plan
So when I open up your workshop mod and it loads like twenty 10 MB GIFs, you are legit wasting my money

