[CF-Devel] It is time to get rid of xpms and xbms

[Mark Wedel]

On Wed, 23 May 2001, Chris Lusena wrote:
>
     
      I've used the current color matching 1.0.0 and I can say that the color
     
     >
     
      matching is _very_bad_ IMHO, in fact I find it so bad as to limit
     
     >
     
      playablity. I've switch _back_ to xpm from png because the color
     
     >
     
      matching is so bad, even though since I have sufficient resolution
     
     >
     
      I prefer the bigger tiles. Though I am on a sun which I believe are
     
     >
     
      know for bad X implementations and poor color control, so it could
     
     >
     
      be something odd my system.
     
     
 X doesn't really provide any color matching - its all left up to the
client (or libraries it uses).

 Note that quality of color matching will depend a lot on colors available
for the application.  IF your running netscape and have some pretty
color background, that really doesn't leave much in the way of colors
for the client to use.

 The biggest problem is that the client doesn't know what colors will be
used in the future.  What it probably really needs to do is pre-allocate
a representative set of colors and then match against those.

 Right now, for example, if you re-join the game in say the middle
of the wilderness, that will be a lot of greens and some browns, and
so it will allocate a bunch of those colors.  But now when you wander to
the city which uses more greys, it my start running out of unique colors
at that point - it may have 40 greens and 3 greys.  Much better to have
say 10 greens and 10 greys and so forth.

 But color matching always has some problems.  For example, many of
the newer graphics have nice tones - say something like a smooth
transition from light grey to dark grey.  With color matching, that
may get reduced to 2 colors, so there is a jarring break in the color,
and that break may not be in a place that looks really good.

 There has been discussion to ditch 8 bit and require 16 bit+ displays.
I don't really agree with that - certainly graphics should be designed for
higher bit displays, but if the work to do color matching at least presents
a playbable game (albeit not the most pretty), I don't see any reason to
remove that feature.