[Freeciv-Dev] Re: New tileset.

[Jason Short <jshort@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Arturo Espinosa-Aldama wrote:
> 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.
Cool.

> 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:
Feel free to write some :-).

> Does freeciv support non-indexed PNG files?
This depends on the client being used.  The XAW client only supports 
indexed PNGs, but other clients should be fine with RGBA (or whatever). 
 This has not been particularly tested, however.
> How does it handle transparency? Is the alpha channel honored? Does 
> alpha blending take place (I doubt so, but I'm still asking)?
Same as above - it will probably work under some clients, but has not 
been particularly tested.  I suspect the GTK and XAW clients will not 
work with a transparency layer, but the GTK2, SDL, and Win32 clients 
probably will.
> 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.
This is used for non-iso tilesets only, I believe.  It is used to draw 
fog onto the tiles.  For an iso tileset fog is not likely to work well 
with alpha-layered sprites for any client except the SDL one (depending 
on what sprites you use alpha-blending with).
> 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.
If there are problems, we should fix them as we find them.  Hopefully we 
can do this without compromising things for non-alpha-blended tilesets.
jason