[CF-Devel] xpm removal???

[Klaus Elsbernd]

Well, I have another argument against removing any of the three set.

Something out of (my) history
I started playing crossfire in his beginning on old sun3 systems with
20Mz and three players. And it worked. I used fonts for the playing.
I use the same machines in my museum today. But I can't play crossfire
anymore on it, because it needs a lot more performance.
091.x work well on them today.
Stop, I can hear you: Sun3-Systems are out.
I used SLC/ELC (25Mhz Sparc) with mono displays. Nice, I liked that.
slc/elc are dead (:-()

Since then I started playing on SS10 (2x66Mhz320MB) and I can use xpm's.
Nice, added some flair. But the real flair (imho) is crossfire, not
all the nice pictures. (I have no time to view all those nice pictures,
when a dragon blasts fire on me :-()
But my SS10 got into problems, when the client got introduced. Cients are
nice, but they need performance. Imho: the playing without them was
much smoother (on old machines and for me).
Additionally: I have to use the cfclient-version. The gtk I can't play
because of the lack on performance, Even I have a cpu for the server
and another one for the client.

I started playing on an Ultra166Mhz with the server (100Mbit connection)
on a E450 (4x400Mhz4GB). Well. Much smoother than on my SS10, but not as
smooth as in the early days.
Well SS10 are out. (:-((()

I used the above configuration to play with png's. Impressed. Crossfire
gets nicer. (Nice enough for 1.0 :-))))
But I can't play it with resonable speed on my configuration.
Is the above configuration out?
I'm realy sad.

See it: The flair of crossfire has less to do with nice pictures, than
with lots of features/maps/monsters/spells..., running on all machines
you can imagine. (Crossfire is the test-source, when I install new
historical unix/vax-Box in my museum :-))

Well. I can use the newest amd/pentium system with lots of Mhz.
(Flame on:)
But I won't (have to deal with any of them.) I'm an old fashion unix-bofh.
That's me.
(Flame off)

So please, don't remove the xpm's. Try to convert at least newly created png's
(automatically) to xpm. I think there are many folks out there, which would
thank you for that. Not only me and my friends.

And another conclusion: Try to do something on the performance (without
removing the code for xbm/xpm...).
My impression is, that whith the availability of lot's of Mhz. the programmers
didn't think anymore on better algorithms than on featurism. The code
get's worse and worse. And that's not only an impression of crossfire.
It's an impression of all code developed in the last years. And I have seen
lot's of it. It's part of my job.
Well, Mark and the unnamed others did a lot of work on the code and that's
on reason, that it isn't as bad, as it had been some times ago and it could
have been without him.

Bis dann
Klaus

-- 
"Sure, vi is user friendly.
 It's just particular about who it makes friends with." ;-) 
                                      _________________________
Klaus Elsbernd; System Administrator, BOFH        | 
     
     elsbernd at dfki.uni-kl.de
     
     
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