[crossfire] Graphism, tiles, size, and such

[Nathaniel Kipps]

On Thu, Nov 12, 2020 at 1:26 AM Mark Wedel <mwedel at sonic.net> wrote:
> On 11/11/20 12:59 AM, Nicolas Weeger wrote:
> - should monsters be only tiled squarely (eg 1x1, 2x2, etc.), and we adjust
> the sprite to reflect the height

Based on personal preference, I think that having rectangular monsters
is interesting, and there is no need to force everything to conform to
a square.

> > - should we allow sprites to overflow on top of another sprite, so the height
> > would appear (the hill giant would then be 1x1 with a 1x2 sprite adjusted to
> > its feet)

I would say no. CF already does well with non-overlapping sprites
looking "good", I think adding overlapping sprites in any fashion is a
huge effort for minimal gain. At the very least, it's a large shift in
the project direction, and one that I wouldn't like.

> > Another thought was wondering about making 48x48 (or 64x64?) sprites.
> > I'm not saying to redo all sprites, but maybe clients could handle resizing
> > from 32x32 to 48x48 when required or directly use a 48x48 sprite. This would
> > allow to slowly rework some tiles as we feel it, introducing more details.

Per SilverNexus' efforts, there is already some level of support for
other sizes of sprites. I would suggest that effort toward other
sprite sizes be limited to alternate tilesets, and if such a tileset
was ever complete enough to be used for the entire game, then the
client devs can decide if they want to make it the default, and if
they need any fallback logic for missing sprites.

>   The gtk client at least supported resizing the images used for the map and inventory.  As resolution has gone up (a 25x25 map at 32 pixels/image is only 800x800), bigger images could certainly be done.  I'm not sure the correct size - whether 128x128 would be best, and then scale down would be best way to future proof for a while?  Disadvantage is size.

When calculating the "new ideal" size, remember that many screens are
rapidly increasing not only resolution, but also density. Both 2k @ 27
inches and 4k @ 27 inches are rather common right now, and densities
could increase even more, especially on laptops (4k @ 15 inches is not
unheard of)

>   But I suppose it depends on what is the minimum reasonable 'unit' for most things to me.  For small monsters, I wonder if it would be easier to let small creatures share a space - instead of the 'is there something alive on this space', instead each creature could have how much of the space they use.  So small creatures might only use 25% of a space, so 4 of them could be on the same space. Though I'm not sure how you deal with what image is used for each of those creatures.

I don't really like this idea, partly because I don't see much of a
reason to have it. (We're still basically a Gauntlet/Nethack/LoTR, and
I like it that way.)

--DraugTheWhopper