[CF-Devel] throw away xmbs? (yes please)

[Mark Wedel]

Michael Toennies wrote:

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      This is really what we need: a MAPFACES and GETFACES cmd.
     
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      The server simply do a list of the face of a map you enter the first time,
     
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      removes all face the player has got before and send them as a long data
     
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      string.
     
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      MAPFACES  len <face|name|face|name|face|...>
     
     
  Yes - I had originally tried doing some work on it.  This implied caching, so
it loaded any local images it has.  There was also an option for it to request
any missing images from the server so it could start with a complete set.

 The one complication to this fact is that the amount of bytes to transmit all
that information is fairly large (more than 64k), so at the time of the my
initial attempt (before the server did buffering), it became much more
complicated.

 You would still need to send several such commands, simply to stay within the
internal buffer sizes that the server->client communication supports, but that
isn't a big deal.

 But the client also has to be a little clever in requesting images it does not
have - if it requests all 2000 for example, the server will go and process all
those requests at once, and that will go beyond even the buffering that the
server implements, so it has to request them in reasonable sized batches (the
complete png file is about 1.2 MB, the bitmap one is about 420k).