[Freeciv-Dev] Re: (PR#2369) iso-view eye candy

["Daniel L Speyer via RT" <rt@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Wed, 20 Nov 2002, Jason Short via RT wrote:

> 
> This patch provides a rework of the Eye Candy system:
> 
> - Eye candy is supported for all terrain types.  Of course it might not 
> make much sense for some.
> 

This is good -- I should have done it this way to begin with.

> - Eye candy types are linked after we receive ruleset data.  This will 
> allow things to work under alternate rulesets (untested).
> 

What's the issue here?

> - The number of eye candy sprites is not limited to two per terrain type.
> 
> - Only one eye candy can be shown per terrain type (of course, you could 
> just make another graphic with the combination).
> 

I think this may need a little reworking.  Your formula puts one or no
eyecandy on each tile with equal probability.  In my examination, I found
that to be too much.  It will probably be nessesary to include blank
eyecandies.

Consider: to duplicate the present desert eyecandy effect, 24 eyecandies
will be needed:
15 blank
4 with a cactus
4 with a skull
1 with both

Granted, each candy need be *drawn* only once, and multiply referenced by
the spec file, but this is a rather tiresome way to do it.

Perhaps some mechanism should be included for stating probabilities in the
specfile?  Even so, mannually drawing combinations requires exponential
effort, but the numbers are likely to remain small enough for this to be
sane.

> - A view option is provided controlling whether eye candy is drawn. 
> (There's no MUI support, and win32 support is untested.)
> 

This has always been there.

And one change omitted from the list:

- Multi-dither is removed from the patch, hopefully for seperate inclusion
  later

All in all, it looks good.  And thanks for picking it up when I dropped
it.

--Daniel Speyer
If you *don't* consider sharing information to be morally equivalent to 
kidnapping and murder on the high seas, you probably shouldn't use the
phrase "software piracy."

> - I've converted eyecandy.xpm to a PNG.
> 
> - eyecandy.spec gets some updates because of the ruleset issue.  Is 
> there a better way to do this?
> 
> I think this is an elegant way to give tileset authors a _lot_ of 
> control over what is displayed.  Now the tilesets need to catch up.
> 
> jason
> 
>