[Freeciv-Dev] Re: Suggestions

[Daniel L Speyer <dspeyer@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Mon, 4 Feb 2002, Ben Webb wrote:
> On Mon, 4 Feb 2002, Pasi Valminen wrote:
[snip]
> > You may wish to consider using PNG file format for graphics. This would
> > result in better looking tilesets thanks to the alpha filter available
> > for PNG.
> 
>       I believe it has been considered. The Win32 client uses PNG, IIRC. 
> The main advantages of XPM are 1. portability and 2. text format, so it 
> works well with patch/diff/CVS.
> 

I'd put in another vote for PNG.  Having done a lot of tileset work
recently, I've wanted alpha-blending several times by now.

At the scale freeciv works with, PNGs aren't very textual.  there's little
point in using diff on them when the lines are so long, and the
colormap is so big that nobody can read them by eye anyway.  I don't know
of a graphical diff tool, but, if there is one, it probably supports png.

As to portability, I thought we'd worked out that it wasn't an
issue.  What platforms does freeciv run on or intend to run on that
support xpm but not png?  We know of one (windows) that supports png but
not xpm.

Furthermore, libpng is already close to a requirement for freeciv.  In
Redhat, Mandrake and Debian (and probably every GNU-based system), Freeciv
requives libgdk_imlib requires libpng.  I imagine it's the same for BSD.

So I really think we should move to png.  IIRC, there's already a patch
written for the gtk client, and converting the tilesets would be trivial.

Opinions?

--Daniel Speyer
"May the /src be with you, always"


>       Ben
> -- 
> ben@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx           http://bellatrix.pcl.ox.ac.uk/~ben/
> "There is but one step from the grotesque to the horrible."
>       - 'His Last Bow. Wisteria Lodge', Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
> 
> 
>