Re: [Freeciv-Dev] Re: Suggestion concerning tile specs

[David Pfitzner <dwp@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

sebauer@xxxxxxxxxxx (Sebastian Bauer) wrote:

> > Yes, but the problem here is that ideally the _base_ format 
> > should be png, so one can have lots of colours, and that 
> > would be converted to xpm (with fewer colours) for clients 
> > which don't support png, not the other way around.
> 
> Doesn't png add new dependies for gtk client?

Maybe, but thats tangential to my point.

> Actually at least the trident tile set don't use so
> much colors that a png format is really necessary 

But, we have a chicken and egg problem: the current
tilesets _cannot_ use lots of colours because xpm
doesn't support lots of colours well!  (I don't know
if Tatu Rissanen has a high-colour version which the
xpms are derived from or not.)

> (at
> least the price that the xaw client cannot read them
> before they are not converted ist too high, IMO).

The idea is that we (freeciv) would do the conversions 
(reducing the number of colours as appropriate etc)
and include them in the distribution (of freeciv or
the separate tileset).  

> But if somebody create a new png tile set with more
> colors we can still do them in the cvs. But this tile
> set mustn't be the default one because I think the
> default tile should be readable by all clients without
> any changes.

Its easy to convert a high-colour set to use a small
number of colours.  Going the other way (usefully) is
much harder.

>  So I also suggest to make the trident
> tile set as the default tile set because for the
> current default tile set it might be useful to be
> in the png file format. 

Well, I was also going to suggest making the trident set
the default, simply because they look good and are a good
default size :-)

-- David