This one threw me for a loop as well. I looked at that gfx file for a whole day before I finally understood what was in it. I only knew to separate it into five piles because of the hint forums though. I guess I'm not intuitive enough. :)
I too did this challenge without PIL. Just remember that all files are just bytes of data. Hopefully, that idea with the rest of the hints will help you along. On a side note, level 13 was really fun. No images at all (whew!) and I got to learn something about Python AND the other technology used. As for level 14.... back to images. I really didn't like this level and it was the first time that I needed to find a solution. Yes, I cheated on this level. I'm not proud of it. But as it turns out, my solution was correct, but I was going in the wrong direction. I figured as much from the hints in the forum, but when I reversed my algorithm, it still ended up wrong. I didn't realize that there were four directions you could use to build the image. I had only accounted for two and both were not right. *sigh* On to level 15. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
