Re: XPMs in crossfire (Was Re: er...xbmtoxpm???)

[Mark Wedel <master@rahul.net>]

 I thank Kjetil for the color base XPM file.  I was going to make one up
myself, but he beat me too it.

 Getting rid of multiple archetypes for large objects has some other
advantages also:
Fewer archetypes
Fewer objects

 Both of these are likely to increase speed of the game some.

 What can be done for large archetypes is for have a width & height
element in each object, so say how many squares wide and high the object is.

 With non font drawing, it may actually be quicker.  This is because instead
of setting the clipmask for 4 or however many images, and then drawing
them, just one image is drawn (and just one pixmaps needs to be set.)

 But there is also the problem in that different portions of the larger
archetype may have different properties.  For example, you can't walk through
the roof of a shop, but can walk in the area below the roof.  If
say the magic shop just becomes one archetype, then it becomes extremely
difficult to do this.

 Many areas do become mroe complicated.  For that dragon, if someone tries
to move into any of the squares he occupies, you need to get taht dragon's
object.  If at load time, you jsut clone 4 of him, then you are not
gaining any space savings by having fewer objects.  So you then need to
have some link or something similar for all the spaces the dragon is on.

 I think at some time, the font and bitmap support will probably disappear.
With client server, even relatively slow machines that are not running
the server will probably be able to handle displaying the XPM images.

 I think for the time being, the present display method should be kept.
While it will be a pain to move to a differing display method after the
client split, I think more problems will be caused trying to force what
would amount to be fairly major changes in quickly, so the client/server
know what method to use.

 --Mark