[Freeciv-Dev] Re: Suggestions

[Raimar Falke <hawk@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Mon, Feb 04, 2002 at 02:35:58PM -0500, Daniel L Speyer wrote:
> 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.

I agree that the diff-output of xpms is of no use. But you can include
xpms in a patch. Wavs (which will be included in CVS) are also binary.

> 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.

This is true for the GTK client. This may be different for Xaw.

> 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?

My personal opinion as a developer: no problems with the extra
requirement. I have problems that I have to do the patching of the png
file by hand (save second email attachment or download from ftp; move
to the correct place, ...).

As a maintainer: 
 - costs: some now and some in the future (patching for example)
 - benefits: alpha blending (I just don't know enough about graphics to
 judge it), reduced space (IMHO not an issue, see last discussion
 about this subject)

        Raimar

-- 
 email: rf13@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
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