[CF-Devel] My opinion on tossing xbm/xpm in favor of png:

[Mark Wedel]

Peter Mardahl wrote:
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      I far prefer the xpms to the png images.  I think they look
     
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      a lot better.  I think forcing the use of pngs by default
     
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      would do more harm at this point than good.
     
     
 Its a mix.  The current png images are based on the 32x32 xpm's that david
sundqvist did a while back.  For those that were actually done for 32x32, they
look better, for those not, they look worse.

 In reality, for many images, it probably would have made more sense to just
transer the 24x24 without expansion - for things like items, this would work
fine.  For things like background, that obviously was not an option.

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      More productive, I think, would be more of a move of image from
     
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      server to client side.  I know this is difficult, but it would
     
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      allow someone to, say, create his own client which uses ASCII
     
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      characters for everything, or uses his own custom 128x128 uberimages.
     
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      We could send the archetype name+ an int to ask for an image?  How much
     
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      additional bandwidth/CPU would this require?  Could we send the
     
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      archetype name once and assign an int for second requests of that image
     
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      during a single session?  This would require a large bitmap
     
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      (NumImages bits) for each client.
     
     
 This can already be done - if you choose the image caching option, the server
says 'image 50 is orc.111' for example.  So a client could certainly have a
complete set of images it uses of whatever size and format it finds convenient.

 The problem with that is that as new images are added to the server, the client
has to be updated or the client still needs to be able to deal with whatever
image format and size the server has.

 Or for a text only client, it would obviously have to have some idea what the
different names mean (if you go nethack like, most of the monsters could just be
represented by the first letter, but things like money and gems would require
some more intelligent handling.