Re: crossfire

[Robert Forsman <thoth@reef.cis.ufl.edu>]

In message <199207082252.AAholmenkollen.ifi.uio.no01499@holmenkollen.ifi.uio.no
> you wrote: 


> This would be useful (especially for opening doors :). On which keys
> do suggest to put it?
> 

  <Alt> or <Meta> ?

> There are two reasons for not changing the size of the bitmaps:
>  - we would have to draw new bitmaps
>  - the larger the bitmap, the more difficult/the more effort it is to
>    make it look good.
> 

  See below.

> Crossfire is currently using a font, and a font must be monochrome.
> Monochrome support is definetely going to stay, so we would have to
> draw and keep one monochrome image used for the font, and one pixmap.

  Not really.  The XPM format supports color, monochrome and greyscale all in the
same image.  There are programs to merge a pixmap and a bitmap into the same
pixmap so that the pixmap will appear when you have a color display and the
bitmap will appear when you have a monochrome.

  If you ever do decide to go to pixmaps, make them a little bigger :)

> Every pixmap would need to be in a separate file, too, leading to lots
> of small files chewing up disc space. The way it is now, you can

  Not really.  You can concatenate them into one big file, #include it and use
the XpmReadPixmapFromData function.

> Using a font is fast: You can draw a whole line at once in monochrome,
> ie. minimum protocol overhead. When you draw one character, you send
> one byte, when you send a monochrome pixmap, you send 72 bytes, when
> you send a 16 colour pixmap, you send 288 bytes (plus overheads). Do
> we want to make resource hogs?

  As the other person mentioned.  This only happens at startup.  Pixmaps are
stored on the server.

> It sounds like you think there is a problem with Crossfire's handling
> of this.

  Not really.  I'm just acknowledging that this problem is a real bitch and I'm
still not thrilled with your solution.  Don't get depressed.  I have yet to see a
solution that I'm thrilled with.


  My main "gripe" with crossfire is that it's trying to be parts of several games
at once and maybe it's grabbed the wrong parts.  But why should I complain?  I
didn't invest scads of time in it and I'm sure other people love it! :)

  Maybe I should just write Xelda (the generic Zelda clone with random
monsters)...

  Another thing.  Somebody needs to find a real ARTIST and have them draw the
pictures!  Too many coders and not enough artist