[CF List] PNG Images

[Mark Wedel]

Jeffrey Hantin wrote:
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      One thing I did notice as an advantage of xpm: a single xpm can
     
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      support multiple colormaps for different color depths, thus allowing
     
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      the client to choose a colormap appropriate to its visual and depth.
     
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      This also eliminates the need to have separate monochrome xbm images,
     
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      unless they're used to deal with downlevel clients-- and I don't know
     
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      that clients that old are supported.  So for that matter, why not drop
     
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      the xbm?
     
     
 Actually, png can also do this.  I don't think the images as currently
distributed have this set up.

 I remember asking about xbm a while ago, and apparantly there will still a
number of people out there playing on monochrome x-terminals and the like. 
While xpm worked on those, you didn't gain much, but using them took up more
bandwidth and memory, so xbm worked fine.

 Png at least doesn't use up nearly the space of png, but still a bit more than
xbm (you can't really look at the ones in the arch distribution, as those are
the text representation.  In the crossfire.xbm file, they are converted to
binary, and each one is 72 bytes).  With pngs, the space isn't quite so bad
(from a limited sample, it looks like the png's are roughly 3 times the xbm, and
the xpm is 3-4 times bigger than the png)


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      I think part of the issue is whether the graphics should look iconic
     
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      or photographic.  In 24x24 or even 32x32, I think it's a small enough
     
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      space to warrant iconic style, which also copes well with a restricted
     
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      colormap.
     
     
 I believe a lot of it was simply because the original 24 colors was not a
really good represenation of the colors - it basically covered the 12 or so
colors of the original game and I filled in some more, but I believe there were
some colors that were basically absent that David wanted to use.

 I don't think even at 32x32 you can every really get them looking photographic
- if you try that, more likely it will just appear as a blur.