[Freeciv-Dev] Re: XPM format

[Andreas Kemnade <akemnade@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Brian Olson writes:
 > On Monday, January 22, 2001, at 07:32 PM, Vasco Alexandre Da Silva Costa 
 > wrote:
 > 
 > > On Tue, 23 Jan 2001, Thue wrote: 
 > >  
 > > > Any reason not to move the freeciv gfx to .png? 
 > >  
 > > Having to depend on libpng and zlib is one. 
 > 
 > Interesting. In writing the MacOS X port(still coming along, slowly), I 
 > converted all the .xpm files in data/ to png. MacOS X's Aqua/Cocoa GUI 
 > library supports reading a lot of formats, but not xpm. Aside from GIF, png 
 > seemed the most convenient format that had the right sort of keyed 
 > transparency. And png is of course more politically correct.

I have the same opinion.
 > 
 > Is the situation similar on Windows? Is png a better format for moving to 
 > true color tiles an sprites?
Windows has no native png support, so we have to depend on
libpng and zlib.
But png would be the only format which is supported on almost all
platforms. You can leave the xpms in cvs and have different formats in
the different binary distributions but should the modpacks be
distributed in many different formats, too.

You can also read PNGs quite easily on AmigaOS. Just install the
corresponding datatype and all applications that use that
infrastructure can load PNGs.

Greetings
Andreas Kemnade