[CF-Devel] The Art of ... Cf

[Mark Wedel]

Michael Toennies wrote:
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      Hi
     
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      This is a controversial mail. I will make same suggestions of changing the
     
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      arts in
     
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      size and color depth. It will effect the way, cf handles the the pictures
     
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      and communicate
     
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      with the client. Also, there a changings to the sound interface.
     
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      Also this is a little faq in pngs and gfx handling because here are many
     
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      people
     
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      who don't know it. So don't be affraid if you read things you know.
     
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      My suggestions are:
     
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      a.) goint to png pictures as default for the next client/server version
     
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      b.) using 24 bit color depth as default
     
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      c.) using of palette tables (see below)
     
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      d.) increase the pictures size of a tile to from 32x32 to 38x38
     
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      e.) include a real sfx interface
     
     
 I'm just going to respond to the points quickly and not go into long
discussions:

 A) png default for client:
the X11 and gtk client support png just fine.  All the user has to do is run
with -png.  I am going to do some work to make it easier to make png the defautl
client (basically have a value in config.h for default image type, and if set to
png, it does the right thing with respect to image sizes and the like.  It may
be reasonable the if the client compiled in with png support (found the png
library) use png as the default.

 B,C) 24 bit depth & palette tables:  the png images are the format they are in
right now because that is basically how they got converted.  If another png
format is better, that is fine.

 Paletted images is a nice idea.  I would imagine that for simplicity, you would
have to have some general color schemes (different shades of blue, grey, green,
etc) or a base rgb value.  It would take some bandwith for map updates - right
now, all that is sent there is the image number, so any palette information adds
a little bit of space, but I agree, probably not too bad.  Also, a palette field
would need to be added to the objects so you know what palette each object has.

 D) Picture size bigger:  More personal preferance for improvement is to
increase the size of the game window from 13x13 tiles to something like 17x17 or
19x19.  For 32 pixel sized images, that is a change of 416 to 608 if we presume
19x19.  That doesn't exclude making images bigger, but I haven't seen that be a
major issue.  And one problem with bigger icons is inventory lists - the bigger
the icon, the less inventory that can be listed.

 However, a lot of the current png images are just blown up 24x24 xpm's, so a
lot of image cleanup can be done.

 E) Sound effects:  The sound effects has been around for a long time as it is
now, and really needs to be redone.  The objects themselves really need to have
sound effect information (right now, all sound effects are basically hard coded
into the source).  That works OK for some, but having it in objects would be
better.

 It also makes it more complicated, because some objects would have different
sounds depending on their state.  But you won't get any argument from me that
sound affects are out of date and a bit primative.