[CF-Devel] And almost a year later...

[Tom Barnes-Lawrence]

Hello...
   Some of you guys may possibly remember, back around may/june last
year, I briefly (and perhaps a bit stupidly) subscribed to the list,
in order to get out an idea or two I had had regarding random maps
(and my thoughts on a variation, random quests with random quest
maps), and said that I had to unsubscribe again due to leaving uni,
but that I would resubscribe again the next week and send in some
prototype for the map generator...
Or you may not remember. It then took me about a week to even
unpack the computer, then I had 1 or 2 other things to do, and
due to a combination of multiple ISPs, strange family windoze boxen
losing my user and email accounts, my unwillingness to set up
Exim on my machine to work with a dial-up connection, and
getting into other games for a bit... It all never happened. Excuses
excuses.

  Anyhoo, here I am again, with a crappy hotmail address, no sign
of a random-quest-map generator mysteriously appearing on my machine,
a handful of (unfinished) maps, and a whole bunch of things that
have happened to crossfire for me to catch up on...

  I might as well share my thoughts on the whole PNG,XPM,XBM argument
since near everyone else on the list has things to say on it, and
it is a very significant part of the CF experience:

  Firstly, I always find it a tough idea to make a game like CF
unusable with certain machines-EG, I have a Sun SPARCClassic here
(temporarily, it'll be a present), and it of course only has
crappy 8-bit colour. But, I ran cfclient remotely on it, and was
able to play quite comfortably on it. The sound was coming out of
the PC, but no matter.
I vaguely remember those old ELC/SLC machines that I'd used a
little at uni, with the mono displays, the design had seemed
pretty neat and I'd considered getting a 2nd hand one of those
for myself, but I could never find a reason. But it would seem a
shame to make CF unusable on one.

  Also, I've seen some of the screenshots for the DX client, with
the PNG images. I'm sorry to say it, I mean no disrespect to the
artist, but near all of the tiles I saw on them were AWFUL. I
especially got upset seeing the Dreads and Beholders there,
as I mainly think they're the coolest looking creatures in the game.
I like them looking like a big evil orange, staring at ME, not my
CHARACTER! I am real, and alive, my character is not real and doesn't
care what the creatures look like.

  I understand the idea that the XPM's style of crossfire graphics
is strictly speaking unrealistic, as the style of isometric
perspective is not quite right, and the monsters are mainly in
a different perspective, but they'd looked fine that way! Look
at art of ancient Egyptians; or of Australian Aborigines- They
traditionally drew a sort of U shape to represent people, which was
like a top view of somebody sitting, and all their art took this
sort of POV, but when their kids got introduced to western style
of drawing, they ended up drawing eg:houses, the way white kids
would draw them, but with U shapes outside for people.
  What I'm really getting at here is, it is a very human way
to deal with pictures, that usually things just *represent* actual
things. I can see that the monsters in crossfire, and for that
matter nethack, etc. aren't shown at an appropriate angle compared
to their surroundings, but I accept it, it looks right, the games
are not designed to look *real*, they are tile based games, where
the things shown are only supposed to *represent* the things that
are there.
If you had similar sorts of angles in Quake, you would not be able to deal 
with it properly, but in crossfire, etc, these things look
perfectly natural. I'm sure the majority of the people on the list
understand this point fine, but it seems there are still some who
don't; so, that should be the majority of my "realism" rant out
of the way. BTW, a good friend of mine who recently got a paid job
as a full time artist (last time I heard) loves nethack, and even
the full-ascii ADOM roguelike. So there's the answer to Michael
Toennies' suggestion that any artist would turn down such a style
of graphics. He may have a point re the 3 sets of tiles tho..

  I'm not all anti PNG tho, I recognise that the appearance of the
PNG tiles is not really down to the fact they are PNG, but if they
were the same size, all the old XPM tiles could have just been
converted straight across no problem! 32x32 size tiles could
probably be done to look OK if they'd all been redone in a nicer
style; also if it is true that PNG files of same format are
smaller than XPMs, and the png library is faster than xpm, then
there is no *long-term* reason to keep XPM, only the fact they
*currently* look so much better than PNGs. The XBMs, of course
have very good technical reasons for keeping, but also the drawback
of having to do mono faces as well, so I'm unsure, but think
*maybe* they should go too???

COLOURS
  I read several of Michael Toennies' points regarding the graphics,
and though I disagreed with many of them, I found one post
that talked about some sort of weird virtual palletting system.
I couldn't quite understand what he was trying to say (sorry Michael
:
     
     ), but it sounded possibly very interesting. Maybe someone else
     
     could explain what he meant...
  I think one of the reasons that the XPM graphics look good is that
the number of colours are limited to a (fairly good) small range,
and so things sort of gel together, you know? The idea of having
swappable pallettes of colours for maps, so certain faces could be
rendered to look very different without someone having to draw new
versions, seems a fairly neat idea. I think there was more to it,
but I couldn't follow it all properly. There was also mention of
PNGs being 24bit by default, but using pallettes... can someone
clarify this a bit for me?
  It seems to me, colourwise, that it would be pretty neat if when
(if?) the final change to use PNG rather than XPM happens, that
the images would have something like a 256 colour pallette, where
the first 16 are the default ones used currently in the XPM? I feel
that such a thing would keep a nice overall colour-scheme, but
allow flexibility, and the option to run on crappy-old 8bit displays.
  I know it sounds like I want all to go out of their way to support
legacy machines when it affects next-to-noone, but with a game like
crossfire, which is not just tile-based but *orthogonally* tile
based, exceptionally fancy graphics would probably be a waste of
effort-It may even make it look worse, if the tiles are oh-so
realistically coloured...but firmly in a grid. The quality of
one aspect raises your criticality, suspension of disbelief fails...

ANYWAY I've gone on for way too long here. Comments on my POV?
Any final decisions been made on it all yet?

Thanks for your time with this one,
Tom Barnes-Lawrence (AKA Tomble)
PS-I'm staying with this address for the forseeable future, at least
until I'm able to get a permanent connection ;) So I'll be on the
list for a good time for now, you lucky people...
_________________________________________________________________________
Get Your Private, Free E-mail from MSN Hotmail at 
     
     http://www.hotmail.com.