Re: CF: Sliding animation instead of jerking animation

[David Sundqvist <>]

Mark Wedel wrote:

<snippage about smooth animation>

I've been considering these possibilities too for a while, but, IMO, the
changes needed would be as you describe; rather complicated. Would it be
worthwhile to do, or should we simply save it up and start preparing the
code for an eventual move over to complete client side object updates
where the client is responsible for all drawing and moving of objects?

>  If you also wanted things on the client to look cooler, the other thing to do
> would be to have hints/let the client do the darkening/removal of color for
> darkness code.  The server would still determine what is completely out of sight
> due to darkness, but it could potentially send information on the light location
> and intensity to the client, and let the client make smooth circular shading
> effects on the map.  That could potentially save bandwidth since right now the
> server just sends along the masking images as part of the map updates, and those
> would not need to be sent along then.

Well, I've been considering a simple version of this, where you'd send
shading info as a special layer in the map, containing brightness (and
maybe contrast and tint too, which could be used for nice special effects 
like fog and/or fire/sunset/other light colors) and letting the client
render the result. This would actually be fairly easy to implement, since 
you'd just need to pass the compound mapcell pixmaps through a filter
before finalizing on the map. Of course, you'd have to either use a
library like Imlib to do it, or you'd have to start mucking around with
XImages and probably shared memory too to get decent speed (woohoo, and
start coding stuff for different bitdepths and byteordering, etc).

> > I was saving the suggestion of doing real object drawing in the client to
> > the Great OpenGL Crossfire Rewrite around 2005 :).
> 
>  I think moving to a true perspective game would certainly require updating most
> of the maps.
> 
>  And to be honest, with the number of perspective games out there, the fact the
> crossfire is still overview is sort of nice.

Yep, I pretty much agree.

/David

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