[Freeciv-Dev] New tileset.

["Arturo Espinosa-Aldama" <arturoea@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi. I'm producing a wholy new tileset for freeciv, which goes against all 
current tileset tendencies (realism): it's a tileset that will emulate 
Team17's Worms style (check http://www.worms2.com/ to get an idea). So this 
will basicly be a wacky and cartoonish tileset, meant to have lots of colors 
and requiring high resolution displays.
The tile is isometric, and I have already finished the equivalent of 
terrain1 and 2 of macroisotrident. I'm still missing all the units and GUI 
icons, which I plan to get started with after mid-september.
The tileset has been designed using sodipodi and the SVG format, and it has 
a shell script that renders the whole thing from the svg files. Sodipodi is 
a vector-grafics app (a Draw type of application). The whole tileset can be 
rendered at any given resolution at build-time, and the corresponding tar 
file is generated automatically by using this only command, thanks to 
sodipodi and TheGIMP's command-line options.
Unfortunately, I can't find any current documentation on tile building, and 
although the spec file format is quite easy to figure out, I still have some 
doubts:
Does freeciv support non-indexed PNG files?
How does it handle transparency? Is the alpha channel honored? Does alpha 
blending take place (I doubt so, but I'm still asking)?
What is the function of the tx.fog tile? That's the only one that doesn't 
seem obvious to me, and the one that makes me think that freeciv requires 
indexed png files.
Thank-you for your patience. I hope we get to enjoy the new tileset soon.

I know alpha blending is not trivial and may be computing-intensive, but 
what are the odds against receiving a patch that would do alpha blending? 
There are some pseudo-solutions for quick and dirty alpha blending, but I'm 
almost certain that adopting it would require some major re-engeneering of 
the map view to get it working.
Greetings,
Arturo

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