Re: Pixmap update.

[Mark Wedel <master@rahul.net>]

 IF a 5/5/5 color system is used, this is 125 colors (about 1/2 of an
8 bit color map).

 The XPM library allows you to define what pixel color will be used
instead of color if on a non color screen.

 For example, if you have an axe, with a wood colored handle and
white head outlined in black, the pixmap can be defined so that in
black and white mode, the handle is black.

 There is also the ability to do this for greyscale systems.

 Colors:  16 colors is pretty close to what crossfire uses right now.  This
would seem to me that the pixmaps would not look a lot better than the
bitmaps right now under such a system (exception is the masking).

 On advantage is that XPM will do color matching if it can not allocate
all the colors.  However, this means that there are no free colors
left on the display.

 I guess there are 2 questions:  How many colors should the pixmaps
be limited to?  How do we decide what colors these will be?

 The thing that I thought about color pixmaps was that you could do some
shading (darker and lighter colors) to create a more 3-d look.  This,
however, takes more colors.

 I'll look in to see if the number of colors to be allocated can be
controlled.  This way, if someone only wants to use 16 colors, they
could do something like a -co 16 to crossfire.  If someone wants it
to allocate all the colors possible, then they would not pass any
extra arguement.

 However, then someplace is need a list of the order to allocate colors
in.  Otherwise (assuming 16 color limit), the first 4 pixmaps loaded may
fill up that 16 color limit, and those 16 colors chosen may not match very
well to the other pixmaps.

 Likewise, with color matching, it may match colors to ones that are
not used be crossfire (maybe your background image, or xrn, or some
other program).  This might mean that even though you said 16 colors, it
may in fact be using more colors, just sharing them with other applications.

 As for speed:  Drawing only the floor and top object would probably work,
and not hurt speed much (if at all).

   Mark Wedel
master@rahul.net