[Freeciv-Dev] Tiles restructuring proposal

[Daniel Gudlat <gudlat@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hello FreeCiv team,
Reading through Ralf Engels' tiles-howto gave me an idea how we could
drastically reduce the size of the tiles.xpm (adding the Engels tiles
made the CVS snapshots 200KBytes bigger! :-( )

Right now, we have 16 tiles for every terrain: one full tile, and 15
for the seamless connection with tiles of different terrains. Now, this
seamless connection is uniformly handled by drawing small strips of
grassland on the connecting edges.

My proposal:
Have 16 tiles with the grassland connector edges, that are otherwise
transparent. Then, for every terrain type, have two tiles: one for the
basic terrain (e.g. desert), and one other for a special visual gimmick
(e.g. cactus, skull), so things don't get boring. We'd probably need an
additional flag in the tiles struct (extending the specials field?), to
remember which tiles have a gimmick and which don't (another mapgen
option similar to specials?).

When drawing a tile, instead of looking up the terrain, then looking at the
neighbours, then drawing the terrain tile with the correct connector edges,
we'd draw the terrain (and gimmick), then look at the neighbours, then
overlay the drawn tile with the correct connector tile.

Shouldn't be too hard to implement, though ocean tiles may deserve some
special treatment, so we get some beach as well...

Now, does that sound sensible and doable, or am I just raving mad? ;-)

Bye,
-- 
Daniel "Gudy" Gudlat                (mailto:gudlat@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx)
ICQ-UIN: 5258903               (http://www.informatik.hu-berlin.de/~gudlat)
"Let us do the undoable, let us think the unthinkable.  Let us prepare to
grapple with the ineffable itself, and see if we may not eff it after all!"

-- 
Daniel "Gudy" Gudlat                (mailto:gudlat@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx)
ICQ-UIN: 5258903               (http://www.informatik.hu-berlin.de/~gudlat)
"Let us do the undoable, let us think the unthinkable.  Let us prepare to
grapple with the ineffable itself, and see if we may not eff it after all!"