Images, was Re: [CF-Devel] And almost a year later...

[Mark Wedel]

 Might as well have the subject represent what this is really about.

 In terms of PNG - I think the big problem is with the isomorphic monsters (and
some of the scaled up xpm images).  After MichT's mail on images and
perspective, it became pretty apprantly that the isomorphic monsters are just
wrong.

 In terms of other images in the PNG set, are there other ones that are really
bad?  

 As for palletized png images, this is my understanding with perhaps some more
direct questions that can get a direct answer.

 The idea of palletized images is that there is some number of pallets, so
someplace, the server can say 'display image X using pallete Y'.

 What I'm not sure is if pallete Y (or use of pallete Y) is some global pallete
for all images, or if each image has some number of pallets.  Hopefully the
later, as trying to deal with global palletes would seem to not really work very
well (for example, change the green in the monster or orange via pallete may be
cool, but you probably really don't want to change the green in the trees to
orange for example)

 So I thinkg palletized images could work.  Note that back in history, color was
stored in the archs, and then get moved to be an image attribute.  In terms of
code support, I would probably say that a hybridized naming scheme.  So the the
pallet could be denoted by %(pallet_num) - ie, instead of human.111, it would be
human.111%5 for the 5'th pallete.

 Advantage of that is that if the image does not have a pallete, it could just
use the default one.  This could happen if a player/client is using is own image
set - palletization would be a an optional/looks neat feature, and not something
really needed to play effectively (like sound for example)