Re: CF: Map Zoom

[Scott MacFiggen <smurf@csua.berkeley.edu>]

>Here's a wish for the next version of the client -
>
>I'd think it would be nice to have a "bigger" playing area.
>
>I've got a monitor with a resolution of ~ 1200 x 1000 pixels so
>everything in the playing window is kinda small and hard to see.
>Something like an option to scale the pixmaps by a factor of two would
>do the trick.
>This may slow things down a bit, but as someone said, most people play
>locally anyway.

Let me first state that I agree, larger bitmaps would
be great.

However there are several technical difficulties.. 
The biggest being the current bitmaps are only
24x24 which is a very small sampling rate. Scaling
those up to 48x48 would probably make them look
pretty bad.. And techniques like bilinear filter
used to smooth out scaled bitmaps will make things
even worse. Bilinear filtering only works well
on much larger bitmaps.. And it usually used after
scaling a large bitmap down, not up. Another problem
is that 24 isn't a power of 2, crosfire should have really
been done with 32x32 images. 

I'm currently working on adding PNG image support to
the server and one of the clients, the server part is
almost done, I'll probably start work on adding support
to the X11 client next week. I should be able to support
bitmap scaling easily with that image format so it is 
worth a try. Although I don't think it is going to work
very well. If we had artistic people with time, it would be
nice to resize all the images to 64x64 and touch them up..
Then scale down from there for people with small displays..
Although 64x64 is pretty big, 32x32 might be the best option.
I doubt anyone has the time to do this though.

	-Scott
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