[crossfire] Graphics, was Re: IRC traffic for Sunday Oct 22

[Mark Wedel]

Alex Schultz wrote:
> Graphics:
>     -Symbolic value lacking in some cases
>         -Good symbolism means "recognizable at first glance"

  I'd think that those could be cleaned up as identified.

>     -Consistancy lacking it many cases

  That also needs to be cleaned up.  I'd say that images should be consistent 
within the class of images themselves.  For example, items you pick up would be 
one class, ground would be another class, etc.

>     -Larger?

  That should probably get sorted out sooner vs later, as it has lots of other 
effects.  Going to larger images has a pretty direct impact on viewable map 
size.  Making such a change is a huge amount of work.  Choosing a large size 
could be seen as some advantage, as resizing smaller will generally yield good 
quality where as the reverse won't.

  That is to say, if the images are 64x64, some people in order to get the map 
size they want will scale the images down to 40x40.  That will appear better 
than image the images are 32x32 and for some people, they get scaled up to 
64x64.  Disadvantage is more bandwidth to download them (but maybe not a huge 
amount, as I imagine on the 32x32 images, there is a fair amount of overhead for 
the png header itself?)

  As an aside, the server does support multiple image sets, so in theory, one 
could make a 'big' image set.  The problem is that the client would have to know 
that these are bigger images (and not just big images), which would probably 
require extending the protocol some, but probably not much.


  Other thoughts:
- As per other e-mail I sent out, should player images be made larger to be more 
visible?

- There are still a fair number of images that were never resized properly - 
several of the shops appear 'small' because they are - only 48x48 (centered in a 
64x64 tile). IIRC, this was done in the xpm->png conversion - scaling up the 
images was disliked because of bad results, so instead the same size was kept, 
with I believe the hope that they would eventually get scaled up and touched up. 
   That might have been more likely to happen if  the images had been scaled up 
- then they look ugly, and someone takes the task to do the touch up.

- IMO, more multi tile images, and greater use of them could be nice.  There 
will always be the problem with scale, so long as the player is a single tile 
and most of the images they deal with are single tiles.  If you had a prety hard 
rule that all buildings must be at least 2x2 to better suggest scale, that helps 
things out (but is major map redesign work).  But another case could just be 
terrain.  Multi tile hill images, and more/bigger multitile mountains could add 
a bit more flavor/variety to the game.