Crossfire Archive
[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index]

Re: CF: win32 client and XPM

>_My_ conclusion is that the emphasis should be to ease c). That is,
>images received from the server should be in an extremely simple
>format, so clients can create a "bitmap" with "less than a screenfull"
>of code, and dump that bitmap onto their local disk in their native
>image format. Or they could create a large image. Doesn't really matter,
>since that's a decision to be made by the client designer.

I don't think it is as simple as that. The native format for
windows I believe is BMP (I could very well be wrong). Well,
BMP has no idea of transparency so there would be no way to
stack images which is why XPM is so cool. So you still
need to store images in some intermidiate format and combine
them to form a windows native format image as you need it...
It would be much simpiler for everyone if this intermediate
format were the same for all clients and the server. 
This issue that I brought up is XPM isn't currently supported
in any way that I could find on Windows. Although someone
did mention that the xpm library could be compiled under windows
but that is was very slow... This being the case I brought
up the idea of researching another possible file format to
use instead of XPM which has equal support on Windows
and Macintosh and UNIX and Java (I did find several free
PNG classes for Java) and I dunno, BEOS, etc... The other
solution of course is to write an XPM lib for windows..

>I'm not even sure that I like compressed XPM images to be sent by the
>server, since that already complicates things. Instead, people should
>download the set of standard images "precreated" for their client,
>or they client might even come with the complete set of _standard_
>images. New images, special images used by a server (or map, if the "put
>images into maps" gets done) would be added automatically via the
>image caching mechanism; but there will only be _very_few_ images,
>so compression probably makes things complicated without adding any
>benefit.

I agree 100%.

	-Scott
[to unsubscribe etc., send mail to crossfire-request@ifi.uio.no]
Follow-Ups: References: