[Freeciv-Dev] Re: (PR#7127) [FS] Screen design

["Morgan Jones" <morgan.jones@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

<URL: http://rt.freeciv.org/Ticket/Display.html?id=7127 >

> The client per se isn't tied to a screen size or screen depth. It
> supports 24bit colors but the backend can map them to the nearest
> color if a paletted mode is used. So this is more an issue how large
> and with many colors the various images (background, button, ...)
> are drawn.

Well currently there's only 64 colours.  The main thing that is
affected by this is the quality of the dithering.  Once I've got the
design and layout down I'll expand this so that all the dithers are
made as smooth as possible.

The important thing to remember is that the tileset itself has it's
own colours and 'pens' need to be left available for it to display
well.  I deliberately included the trident/isotrident colours into
the palette I've been using so they shouldn't be a problem.

That's another reason why grey is a good choice, especially when doing
smooth dithers:  all the tilesets use grey to some degree or another,
and grey is often used when dithering other colours.

If we were to design the GUI with a smooth blue dither for example
we'd possibly be cutting quite deeply into the number of pens
available for the tileset.  

So I'll stick with grey for the 256 colour GUI and we can do whatever
we want on the 16bit or 24bit ones. 

> So while I think 256 colors are enough I agree with Vasco that
> 800x600 would be nice. BUT there is nobody stopping us from
> supporting them both.
> 
> So I would say we target 640x480x256 first and than think about a
> nice 800x600x64k theme.

Sounds good.

     -Morgan