[Freeciv-Dev] Re: Suggestions

[Vasco Alexandre Da Silva Costa <vasc@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Mon, 4 Feb 2002, 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.

Yes i would like PNG support in all clients. However that requires more
than loading support. Read below.

> 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.

Actually, since we are using libpng, and we are not using Windows API
functions so you have no OS support. We require libpng but we could be
requiring libxpm instead.

> 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.

I guess they should be clobbered in the head. libpng is NOT a requirement
for compiling or running libgdk_imlib. I guess they didn't feel like
providing N different libgdk_imlib packages.

> 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.

Yes, its as hard as adding one line. But will you do one for the Xaw
client? I have done one in the past, but i haven't solved the colour
quantization problem. Besides even if we do add support to all clients,
none support alpha-blending right now, except maybe the MUI client.

---
Vasco Alexandre da Silva Costa @ Instituto Superior Tecnico, Lisboa