Crossfire Archive
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Re: CF: win32 client and XPM
>You either get performance or portability, never really both. Think of
>all those modems and network devices that will enjoy a good ASCII stream
>and compress it so well! Give 'em something to do! ;-)
Much better to use a good compression algorithm and turn of compression
on the modem. Much better response time that way. Any good
Quake player will tell you that. But as many people already
pointed out, this really isn't the main issue since the client
should and will cache most images anyway.
>On PNG vs GIF vs XPM. Go for XPM. PNG is untested, too new, and
>although it's "portable", it isn't yet "prevalent". GIF is proprietary.
>XPM is well known with programmers. Lots of XPM code already exists.
>But the real portable format is PPM, in my opinion; part of the PBM code
>set.
PNG is over 3 years old, it is nativly supported in Rhapsody (assuming
apple doesn't die before it is released), and is also supported
in both netscape and IE and photoshop.. Obviously people out there
think it is a worthwhile format.
I think the main reason I like PNG is because of the built
in gamma correction (although probably not real important
for crossfire) and the transluceny (as opposed to transparency).
PNG offers something like 256 levels of transparency. I think
this could make lighting effects really cool instead of the
hackish way it is done now. You could also do tricks like say
someone casts a protection from fire spell. You could make up
a little shield bubble image, make it red, set the translucency
to like 10% or 20% and overlay that on top of the character
image.
I just wanted to bring this stuff up for discussion, I'm not arguing
we should switch to another image format right now. But I
think it is worth experimenting with...
-Scott
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