Re: [Freeciv-Dev] Graphics file format

[falk.hueffner@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx (Falk Hueffner)]

On Mon, 26 Jul 1999 11:55:56 +1000 (EST), David Pfitzner
<dwp@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

>On Mon, 19 Jul 1999 David Pfitzner wrote:
>
>> Since this patch breaks old tiles.xpm, I wonder if this would
>> be a good time to split tiles.xpm into terrain.xpm and 
>> special.xpm?  (Would this be good?  The latter would be 
>> numbers, hit-point bars, etc).  And perhaps also give hills, 
>> forests and mountains a full terrain line, rather than just 
>> four tiles (no vertical continuity).  (Initially the full line 
>> could just be duplications of those four, but it would allow 
>> for later improvement).

If we split the graphics, I would vote to have many, functionally
seperated images, one for bars, one for numbers etc. Another
possibility would be to have a config file which states for every tile
the path/file and position where to find it.

It is currently a bit messy how the tiles are actually found,
sometimes with a base and hardcoded offsets, dependend on the original
image width. An idea would be to give a name to each tile and access
them from the source only via that name; series of tiles would get
numbers: "plains3", "special_wheat" etc. Something like this would be
required if using config files.

>For the Xaw client, it seems we have a few options:
>1. Require the user have some appropriate library to handle PNG
>   (presumably instead of current libXpm requirement).
>2. Include code in freeciv to directly support PNG (presumably
>   scavanged from some other GPL'd source).
>3. Leave the Xaw client using xpm graphics. 

I would use option 3, since, as has been stated in anothe posting, we
would have to write dithering code etc., or use something like imlib,
which requires downloading and compiling about 7 different libraries,
which is a bit annoying.

        Falk



-- 
Falk Hueffner  <falk.hueffner@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>