[CF-Devel] Java editor and image creation.

Fri Oct 31 02:41:37 CST 2003

As mentioned elsewhere, I want to work on visualisation tools, and other 
things.  I have found the visualisation tools that I have either created or 
modified to be extremely useful for debugging/tweaking weather and modifying 
the big world maps.  In particular, the big world image helped me to find 
problems that were not obvious in the editor because they involved the joined 
edges of the maps.  It would have been painfull to spot these problems by 
jumping into the game and walking around.

The big problem with the combine.pl script used to create images of the big 
world maps is the speed, it can take all day to generate the image.  The 
script writer thought of this and made sure that if you have already created 
the images, it only processes the maps that have changed for subsequent runs.

I have used this script for a while now, and I noticed that one of the big 
consumers of time during it's processing is the time taken for CFJavaEditor 
to load the arches.  This is only an issue because the editor loads the 
arches for each map, since combine.pl calls it afresh for each of the 900 
maps.

So I thought to myself, "Dave, it would be handy to only load the arches once, 
then create all the images.".  I have not started making this modification 
yet, I will discuss it here first, then start coding after concensus is 
reached.

Basically, I propose folding combine.pl into CFJavaEditor, so that you can 
generate a single picture of the entire big world from within the editor and 
it won't waste time by loading in the arches 900 times.  The same "only 
generate image data for maps that have changed since the last time we did 
this" logic should be included to further save time during editing.  Since I 
try to write generically, it should support generating images of other tiled 
sets of maps.

I would add a new menu item near the "Create image" called "Create tiled 
image" that would take the current map, follow the tiling until it had a 
complete idea of what maps made up the entire set, then render them all into 
one final image.  An option to overlay map boundaries would also be useful.  
Since you can create images from the command line (which is how the 
combine.pl script works), there should also be a command line option to 
generate tiled images with or without map boundaries.

Yes, I know that the editor is written in Java and the compine script is 
written in perl.  I have programmed in both, and translated from perl to Java 
before.  Anyway, combine.pl is not a very big or complex script.

But first, there are some bug fixes I promised to do...

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