graphics of crossfire.

[Mark Wedel <master@rahul.net>]

 A few messages back, v912152@brulez.si.hhs.nl talked some about
future crossfire additions.

 One thing he said was 3-d code.

 While this might be nice, I think it might be extremely difficult
to do reasonably for multi-player.  Also, it would probably really
kill performance on the slower machines.  And it would require a major
re-write of many portions of the program.

 One thought I have had for improving the graphics of crossfire was to
use color pixmaps (instead of the 2 color bitmaps) for crossfire.  Perhaps
have a command line option to use the bitmaps if pixmaps are too slow.

 Adding the code to use them should not be that difficult (in fact, I
could probably do so with a little work).  The main difficulty is converting
the existing bitmaps to color pixmap form (there are programs that will
do the job, but then you still need to color them).

 Also, in doing so, the color of the object in the archetype file might
become meaningless, since the pixmap would have its color pre-determined,
and could not really be changed like the bitmaps can be.  I don't know
how big of a problem this is.

 I do think that the color pixmaps would look nice for those with color.

 Also, if people were willing to trade program size for speed, a script
could probably be written to include all the bitmap/pixmap files into
a program segment, and then do a CreatePixmapFromBitmapData, reffering
to the included pixmap files.

   Mark Wedel
master@rahul.net