[crossfire] Face information for animations

[Mark Wedel]

Nicolas Weeger wrote:
> Hello.
> 
> 
> When collecting the .face files, the collect.pl script will only write 
> fg/visibility information for faces outside animation, and not all faces. On 
> the other hand, when an animation is defined into an archetype file, the 
> visiblity/magicmap is set for all faces of the animation.
> 
> I'd like to fix that so the various animations can be factorized into .face 
> files, with the face information (color_fg and such), that doesn't really 
> belong to archetypes imo.
> Example: the 'sea' animation is duplicated between 'sea' and 'sea1' (file 
> ground/sea.arch) - it would be much easier to have it defined in sea.face, 
> including color_fg and magicmap and visibility, and just tell 'animation sea' 
> in both archetypes.

  Sounds good.  As a note, color_fg is deprecated, and instead every color_fg 
should get replaced with the 'magicmap' name instead.

  The color_fg (and at the time, color_bg) dates back to when crossfire used 
bitmaps, and those colors determined the foreground and background color.  For 
some images, the foreground color was not a good indicator for magicmap 
purposes, so magicmap (as a supplemental field) was added.

  Bitmap support has been gone for years now.  Within the server, if it finds a 
color_fg, it just sets that face->magicmap to that value.

  I'd actually like to get rid of magicmap at some point also, and change what 
magicmap spell does - maybe instead of sending the color information, which is 
of limited usefulness, it insteads non visible map squares to the client (in a 
sense, fills in the 25x25 map - the client could treat that as fog of war 
information or something).  To be more useful, probably want a zoom out feature 
of the map window, so lots of folks don't play with a 25x25 visible map size.

  But that is a bit beside the question asked here.