[CF-Devel] arch/object changes.

[Scott MacFiggen]

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      Allowing each user to choose between several concurrently installed gfx sets.
     
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      This of course would require the server being able to handle more than one gfx 
     
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      set at the same time, but this should not be that difficult to implement. It 
     
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      would also solve the "battle standard vs alternate", since each player could 
     
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      then choose what he/she prefers.
     
     
This should be trivial and really the clients should be loading images
locally anyway so it should be up to the client which images to use. 

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      >> Now for the old XPMs: I agree that supporting more than one gfx format was
     
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      >> somewhat useless. Now what you need to understand is that some people still
     
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      >> used it because of the smaller size of their screens (XPMs were smaller
     
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      >> (24x24) than PNGs (32x32)).
     
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      >> Wouldn't it be possible to convert all the existing XPMs into PNGs and make
     
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      >> them an alternate gfx set ? This would remove the needs for XPM support 
     
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      while
     
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      >> allowing crossfire to be still played without problem on smaller screens.
     
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      I agree that rescaling causes quite some problems whatever you try to do. I 
     
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      also understand the work overload for gfx makers. I simply wanted to underline 
     
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      a problem not so uncommon, even now. Using SDL for rescaling seems 
     
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      unconvenient, since most "low-screened" machines are also often "low-cpu'd", 
     
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      and rescaling on-the-fly proven to be too slow in most cases.
     
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      Maybe someone has a satisfying solution to this ?
     
     
rescaling is already done in the current unix client. I haven't looked
at the code but I don't think it does any sort of filtering though.
But the scaling only has to happen once, the client then stores the scaled
image in memory. As for SDL, it has no native support for image scaling though
people have written utility functions for scaling within SDL. It probably won't
be hardware accelerated though. 

	-Scott