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 So its correct when i say that the grafiks of crossfire is outdated since about 6-12 years.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 > I far prefer the xpms to the png images. I think they look > a lot better. I think forcing the use of pngs by default > would do more harm at this point than good. > > Sure, the developers might be a bit more motivated to fix all > the ugly ones (of which there are still many): then again, the > people who DO use the pngs don't seem to have been fixing very many. > > But in the meantime, while they're being fixed, the general populace > will have these repulsive, ugly pngs, which may put them off the game > completely. And these people are the people who will succeed us > as the developers one day: *if* we get them hooked. :) > > I would rather see the pngs wait until someone has fixed them up > to an acceptable standard before making them the default (and, in > practice, forcing them on everyone.) > > As to increasing the images size yet further, to 38x38 or whatever. > I shudder. > > I have tried MANY times just to get an artist to draw me > a few 2x1 or 2x2 images of demons. There aren't enough middle > size/strength demons. I've begged on the list. I've begged > some people I met. It's been years. No demons. The 38x38 project, > like the png project, will never get done unless one or two people > are willing to see the project through to completion. > > More productive, I think, would be more of a move of image from > server to client side. I know this is difficult, but it would > allow someone to, say, create his own client which uses ASCII > characters for everything, or uses his own custom 128x128 uberimages. > > We could send the archetype name+ an int to ask for an image? How much > additional bandwidth/CPU would this require? Could we send the > archetype name once and assign an int for second requests of that image > during a single session? This would require a large bitmap > (NumImages bits) for each client. > > PM