gamedev.net recently linked to this video about the making of Marble Madness, which got me thinking about the raster-to-vector via contour extraction script I wrote in Python last year and the fact that, it being the future and all, I can probably find all of the art from Marble Madness unrolled into a single image file. So three clicks later and, oh yeah:

(Click the image for full size)

So I ran the above through my raster-to-vector converter. Here are the results (zipped, this is a huge file, over 20,000 SVG paths)  This file kills Adobe Illustrator. It took 15 minutes just to open it.

SVG for a single level is more manageable.  Here’s  the 2nd level as unzipped SVG … (curious to see if various browsers can handle this) Illustrator could handle this one pretty well so I experimented with applying various vector filters. Below is a bit of it with the corners rounded on the paths (click for a larger version):

Not sure what this all amounts to … just some stuff I did today. However I did learn

• Python is slow. It took a really long time to generate the big file, seemed too long. I think C++ would’ve been like an order of magnitude faster — that’s my intuition anyway.
• My contour extraction program really works which is kind of surprising — I thought for sure running it on something like this would crash it. (It does still have the problem that it can’t handle paletted raster image formats, but that’s the only bug I encountered)