CF: RE: png for images.

[dragonm <>]

I made so many attempts to get new/better graphics done I lost count of the
number of tries.  The most recent attempt was in February.  Every single
artist I have found to date who has expressed an interest has failed to
deliver.  I did say I wanted PNG to all of them.  None of them saw it as a
stumbling block.  I even found two people who expressed an interest in just
doing a mass format conversion of the existing xpm's to png, together with
scaling them up and smoothing the images.  I received exactly 2 modified
images from one of them, and nothing from either of them since.  If I had
any success at all in acquiring media, I would have started integrating the
PNG library already.  As it is, I've about given up.  If you can convert new
32x32 images to PNG, you have my vote.  Maybe you'll succeed where I have
failed.

DM

-----Original Message-----
From: Mark Wedel
To: crossfire mailing list
Sent: 4/29/00 1:08 AM
Subject: CF: png for images.


 This was discussed on the mailing list quite a while ago, but nothing
really
seemed to come from it.

 The general proposal is to add png to the server and the client.  At
some
point, xpm would be discontinued, and maybe/maybe not bitmaps.

 Reasons this is a good thing:
1) png images are smaller than xpm's, so save bandwidth & disk
2) png is arguably has more wide spread support than Xpm does
3) png has some more advanced features in its library (although, I don't
think
it will make much sense for the client to use most of these, as for
reasons of
performance, the client is likely to convert the png to the native
format as
soon as it gets it and not play around with png after that.)

 Reasons this could be a bad thing:
1) change from xpm is likely to break something, but that is true of
most
change.
2) Another library (png) that must be installed.  Note sure how bad that
is, as
the xpm library is hardly standard, so requiring png probably is not any
worse
than that.
3) a pngtoxpixmap function probably needs to be written.  It appears
there are
some libraries out there that do that, but I don't want to start
requiring too
many extra libraries - plus most of those libraries look to do other
more
advanced stuff we are not interested in - this also makes it harder to
just pull
the code from someplace else and put it in the client.

 Tha main reason this is coming up now is that quite a while ago, David
Sundqvist made a set of images in 32x32 format.  Originally, I was going
to wait
until crossfire 0.96.0 to deal with that, but I can see right now that
is still
a ways away.  I would rather get those in now because that way they will
remain
up to date.  Also, the realization came to me that addition of these
images will
only change the client and the protocol areas of the server - the later
is not
likely to be affected in any substantial way in the cf96 changes.

 My further thinking was that instead of just using the new larger xpm
images
and then having to deal with older clients that want 24x24 images and
what not,
addition of a new image format (and size) makes life easier, and now
would be
one of the better times to do it.
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