Re: CF: Map Zoom

["Mark Wedel" <mark@icp.siemens.com>]

On Dec 16,  3:36pm, Scott MacFiggen wrote:

> 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.

 Many points above are true - scaling them up will just result in pixels being
doubled.  However, if you have a high resolution screen, this can still be very
desirable (many pc games play at a lower resolution (800x600 or something), and
still look OK on big monitors.

 Certainly, using larger images must be an option, and not a standard for
everyone.

 I am not sure why the fact the images are 24x24 makes things any worse
compared to if they were 32x32.  As long as the images are increased by a
numeric amount, all should be OK.

>
> 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.

 Server support should be trivial - all it really needs to do is take the
request in and shove it out.  The server code itself should not be doing actual
conversion from xpm to png - rather, png versions of all the images (or during
the collect phase) should be done.

> I should be able to support
> bitmap scaling easily with that image format so it is
> worth a try.

 Scaling probably isn't the harder part.  I think the harder part will be
updating the client to use images of different size - a lot of the stuff is
hardcoded in for 24x24 image size.  But once that is done, any image size
should easily be supported.


> 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.

 I sort of doubt this also - I think more new images would be better done than
spending time touching up all the existing images.  From the addition of xpm
images, it took a very long time for all of those to get converted over.

 I still don't know why power of 2 size is so important - since scaling is
likely to by integer values, it shouldn't really make any difference what the
starting size is (its not like these are bitmaps which you want to try to pack
into integers or something - these are color images with 1 or more bytes for
pixel).  Going to 32x32 doesn't make a lot of sense, since that is a small
expansion which probably would really make a lot of the images look goofy.
 24x24 can be scaled to 48x48 or 72x72 with integer amounts.  I can't see
anyone having a great desire to scale down much, although in theory 12x12 could
be done.


-- 

-- Mark Wedel
mark@pyramid.com
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