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

[Michael Toennies]

Hi

Hm, you all here speak about the problem to get some good artist,
but you all don't see the problem why you dont get one...

They will not come. Why should they do?

- crossfire has a the moment a fuzzy grafik interface
- 24x24 tiles - 16 colors
- and when they will do it at the moment they must draw 3 (!!)
  sets - one black/white, one 24x4 pixels 16 colors, one as png in 32x32
pixels

YOU REALLY THINK THERE IS ONLY ONE GOOD ARTIST OUT THERE DOING THIS?

Sorry, now i must piss you all on. I do it, because you should feel like an
artist who
come in contact with crossfire, asked by you to work for it.

Why you don't also ask them, to drawing naked SM pictures of here mothers
too?
Perhaps he will say ok, but after you tell them to do it in 16 colors, they
will kick
your ass.

Sorry for it, thats not personal :))

But i really must laugh when i think about what an artist today think when
you show them crossfire at the moment - show them all the shiny nice 16
colors,
with this crappy 264x264 pixels window ...

For the xpms it had worked, because they are good as they come out for
linux, they are some kind
of "up to date". But know we have a different millennium and all the fency
artist have a pentium xxx
for a few hundreds bucks in his home with a copy of all of the render
programs you can imagine.

Or why do you think have also the smallest warez site half of all ever
selled renderers in his lib?

There is a shareware version of ULTIMA III out there for the Mac with more
colors and bigger
map then corssfire. So its correct when i say that the grafiks of crossfire
is outdated since
about 6-12 years.

... and then you must tell them to draw it also in black/white "and for the
feature do it as png
in 32x32 but better do it in 16 colors too, because we don't show more
colors yet, so if you draw
then as fantastic true color render, it will look like shit through the bad
color conversion".

Come on guys, tell me one argument why a artist draw for crossfire who is
not one of us fanatics?

NO ONE. Never. You will not find one.

Ok, you can say to him: "draw it now in true color, if we have enough, we
will show."
You really think it will work?
No, it will not.

Its the same, people come to you , asking you to drop internet and cf to
write a fency new
shareware programm for the C64.

Artists are eye people. Believe me, i worked with them for money. They want
see what they do,
they MUST see it. There are only a few guys out there, which can really work
with dummys,
they are all high payed professionels.

So, let me say it again, why we will get no artist for crossfire yet and in
the future for 3 grafik
sets and for 24x24x16 xpms:

 - its boring for them! They will laugh about you! All the way, good artist
today use all the
   fency grafik programm. Even 2D programms now use fency rendered pictures.
As pngs with true
   color/high color or even 256 palettes you can do it, but never in 16
colors.

-  Thats, why if you know to use a renderer and have the modells (there are
out tons of it),
   its much easier to render a dragon animation for example then to draw it!
There are many
   artist out there who render, also much who draw them on paper scan them
in and redraw
   them yet. But the "pixel" guys are like dinosaurs, they vanish more and
more.

-  The time they need to draw 3 sets will upset even the hardest chair ass.
In hours,
   there is no difference in making a black/white, xpm or rendered png. Its
hard work,
   to make a 24x24x16 xpm which should looks nice.

Ok, i can talk hours more about why the things go wrong here on grafik side.
What we all want is a good grafik, easy interface, a good working community
for cf.

What we need is an open interface, a way to make it possible to bring in
even high quality
grafik, who are shown the artist "on demand" in the game.

Thes are what we need, and how it should go:

- we need more colors. 256 are senseless, so simple use 24bit because they
can easily dropped
  down to 256 colors or HighColor. Its the native format this days for
pictures. Remember that
  even if you save pngs as 16 colors, the palette information is 24bit. Use
pngs = use 24bit automatically.
- palette manipulations are state of art, i will finish today the palette
animation interface for
  the dx client and will give out a beta where you can change the palette
"per hand" to some monsters.
  Is really simple.
- You need a way to include new pictures as set or single "at runtime" on
client side.
  In the dx client i have a folder told "ext". When image cmd comes from the
server, the
  client looks first in the ext folder for it. its there, he use it. If not,
he will search
  the cache folder, is it there not too, he will catch it from server and
put in in cache folder.
- Now, you easily can put in pictures in the client, copy it with the same
name in the ext folder.
- A hotkey will force the client to reload the pictures in the ext folder at
runtime, so they can
  be shown.
- We need so many pixels in a tile we can get, so the map looks good in
800x600 and 1024x768
  (that will be standard for the next years). For 11x11 the 32x32 looks too
small in 800x600,
  so add for example 13x13 in 34x34 or so. Just make a big map like possible
with many details,
  the artists need it - and for them the coder do it, not for others!!!
- the dx client will shown only pngs. At what format, we will see, in
extreme, i will get the pngs
  from server, scale them up at runtime and save them in new size, thats no
real problem with
  the png lib. In the ext folder, they will be in native then.

- we need to make the pngs in the linux client as default.

- drop xbms and xpms. That not mean to cut them of now of cf, just don't
make no new one
  except for dummys for new grafiks which comes now and build all new
features around the pngs.
  So you can still play with the xpms or xbm if you give the -xbm at
commandline
- the change to png must be in the mind of the developer, only then it will
work.

- when we have a client with bigger map and highColor/True color we can go
to ask a artist,
  "show this, the pngs now look ugly, try to draw some better" - ONLY them.
- and he must be feeling the cummunity wants his work. He must get the
return next day after he draws
  a new fancy pic - "thats good, thats look cool, etc."

- So, we need a ftp, where artist can store the pngs, and where the guys can
download them.

Thats the only way, we can bind artist to cf. Don't tell me, there is an
other, like many here
wrote, they find no way in the past, so we need new ideas for the future.
BTW, there is an other way
to come to artist, one other is - paying them :)

I hope you see, that i want bring cf in front, not spreading fency ideas
without brain.

Michael

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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.
     
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      Sure, the developers might be a bit more motivated to fix all
     
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      the ugly ones (of which there are still many):  then again, the
     
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      people who DO use the pngs don't seem to have been fixing very many.
     
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      But in the meantime, while they're being fixed, the general populace
     
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      will have these repulsive, ugly pngs, which may put them off the game
     
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      completely.  And these people are the people who will succeed us
     
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      as the developers one day:  *if* we get them hooked.  :)
     
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      I would rather see the pngs wait until someone has fixed them up
     
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      to an acceptable standard before making them the default (and, in
     
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      practice, forcing them on everyone.)
     
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      As to increasing the images size yet further, to 38x38 or whatever.
     
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      I shudder.
     
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      I have tried MANY times just to get an artist to draw me
     
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      a few 2x1 or 2x2 images of demons.  There aren't enough middle
     
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      size/strength demons.  I've begged on the list.  I've begged
     
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      some people I met.  It's been years.  No demons.  The 38x38 project,
     
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      like the png project, will never get done unless one or two people
     
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      are willing to see the project through to completion.
     
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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.
     
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      PM