Re: [crossfire] House sizes
Mark Wedel [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: Maybe it being absolute is a bit too much. But having a general rule of thumb could be a good thing - otherwise things become inconsistent in weird ways. One 2x2 house could enter into a 80x80 building, where a 3x3 house enters into a 40x40 - that type of thing. I like the idea mentioned earlier of trying to keep them within a range. The ranges could even overlap somewhat. Say a house one block wide on the outside could be 1-15 tiles wide on the inside, while a two-block-wide house image could be 10-25 inside, a 3-block house 20-35, and so on. (Or some other set of ranges that fit better with the current buildings.) The bigger the building is on the outside, the bigger it would *tend* to be on the inside, but map designers would still have room for creativity. If for some reason you want a larger map inside your small building, give it a huge basement. :-) Also, there is some limit on how big multipart images can be - I'd have to look at the map protocol, but I think right now it is somewhere in the 6-8 space range. This could be fixed in various ways. I don't know if there's a limit on tile size, but there's a 1-byte limit on images sent to the server in MAX_IMAGE_SIZE. If you raise that, you soon run into MAXSOCKSENDBUF, which is currently 12239 bytes. (I discovered those when I converted the Demon_Lord into a single image and it was considerably larger than that before compression.) I was able to compress Demon_Lord, which is a 4x8 image, to 7841 bytes, but it only has two colors, so I'm guessing a more colorful image would be larger. In any case, I'm sure those limits could be raised, but it's something to consider. Also, do many players still play on an 11x11 map view? Buildings that are 5x5 or so would make that map feel *very* crowded. Maybe we could assume that by 2.0, all the clients would be capable of displaying a larger area than that? -- Aaron -- http://aaron.baugher.biz/ ___ crossfire mailing list crossfire@metalforge.org http://mailman.metalforge.org/mailman/listinfo/crossfire
Re: [crossfire] House sizes
Aaron Baugher wrote: I like the idea mentioned earlier of trying to keep them within a range. The ranges could even overlap somewhat. Say a house one block wide on the outside could be 1-15 tiles wide on the inside, while a two-block-wide house image could be 10-25 inside, a 3-block house 20-35, and so on. As a brief note, I'd be inclined to say the recommended size should start greater than 1. Unless of course we have a 1 tile house outside, where the house takes much less than the full tile image ;) Also, there is some limit on how big multipart images can be - I'd have to look at the map protocol, but I think right now it is somewhere in the 6-8 space range. This could be fixed in various ways. I don't know if there's a limit on tile size, but there's a 1-byte limit on images sent to the server in MAX_IMAGE_SIZE. If you raise that, you soon run into MAXSOCKSENDBUF, which is currently 12239 bytes. (I discovered those when I converted the Demon_Lord into a single image and it was considerably larger than that before compression.) I was able to compress Demon_Lord, which is a 4x8 image, to 7841 bytes, but it only has two colors, so I'm guessing a more colorful image would be larger. I'm thinking, that for 2.0 it may be desirable to use a separate port for media (images anyway) transfer, and perhaps we could even consider http for that part (though I'd say that if we wanted to use http, we'd want to optimize things by using cgi and GET parameters, or perhaps a micro-http-server specialized for serving cf images via http (after all, non-standard-complient http can be very simple ;P)) Also, do many players still play on an 11x11 map view? Buildings that are 5x5 or so would make that map feel *very* crowded. Maybe we could assume that by 2.0, all the clients would be capable of displaying a larger area than that? Well, so far as I can tell, I'd estimate around half of active users use gcfclient2, and a majority of the others using gcfclient, meaning a significant portion of the users are on a map view probably not bigger than 15x15, which is the biggest I can usably get the gcfclient view at 1280x1024 resolution. I believe though, that for 2.0, we should consider depreciating, if not removing, gcfclient and the x11 client. Also, Gros/Lauwenmark apparently has a major update to jxclient just about ready, which looks to me like it could be promising to eventually become a prominent, if not the most prominent, client in my opinion. I believe that for 2.0 we should be able to assume that the client should be able to display at least 15x15 or so, at any resolution that client intends to support, but beyond that we should try to keep our options open for 2.0 clients for now I'd say. Another thought is, do we want to toss the 'classic' tileset? On that same note, would it be worth just plain removing tileset support in order to simplify things? Alex Schultz ___ crossfire mailing list crossfire@metalforge.org http://mailman.metalforge.org/mailman/listinfo/crossfire
Re: [crossfire] House sizes
Aaron Baugher wrote: Mark Wedel [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: Also, there is some limit on how big multipart images can be - I'd have to look at the map protocol, but I think right now it is somewhere in the 6-8 space range. This could be fixed in various ways. I don't know if there's a limit on tile size, but there's a 1-byte limit on images sent to the server in MAX_IMAGE_SIZE. If you raise that, you soon run into MAXSOCKSENDBUF, which is currently 12239 bytes. (I discovered those when I converted the Demon_Lord into a single image and it was considerably larger than that before compression.) I was able to compress Demon_Lord, which is a 4x8 image, to 7841 bytes, but it only has two colors, so I'm guessing a more colorful image would be larger. There are certainly different things that could be done. One would be to have a separate server/process that serves the data file - that could be desirable for other reasons. I'd probably also be good to really force caching to be the standard also. But this is also a different discussion. Also, do many players still play on an 11x11 map view? Buildings that are 5x5 or so would make that map feel *very* crowded. Maybe we could assume that by 2.0, all the clients would be capable of displaying a larger area than that? I don't know how many play on 11x11 (could look at the logs and figure it out). However, one discussion was to have the map size be closer to 19x19 and not the max of 25x25 it is now. 19x19 is still good size, but start put down houses that are 5 spaces big, you may not see a whole bunch. This could also lead to other areas - the town walls should appear higher, trees perhaps bigger, etc. ___ crossfire mailing list crossfire@metalforge.org http://mailman.metalforge.org/mailman/listinfo/crossfire
Re: [crossfire] House sizes
Mark Wedel wrote: Aaron Baugher wrote: Also, do many players still play on an 11x11 map view? Buildings that are 5x5 or so would make that map feel *very* crowded. Maybe we could assume that by 2.0, all the clients would be capable of displaying a larger area than that? I don't know how many play on 11x11 (could look at the logs and figure it out). However, one discussion was to have the map size be closer to 19x19 and not the max of 25x25 it is now. 19x19 is still good size, but start put down houses that are 5 spaces big, you may not see a whole bunch. I don't really think it would be a problem, not seeing a whole bunch on an outdoor map, provided that the town was still easily navigable. Actually, I believe that larger buildings would make the buildings more visually distinct at quicker glances, and thus would improve navigability, counteracting the negative effects of only seeing a smaller area. In addition, perhaps a little fog-of-war-minimap overlaid in the client or something along those lines could work nicely with it, but I certainly don't think that'd be necessary for that scale to work. This could also lead to other areas - the town walls should appear higher, trees perhaps bigger, etc. Hm, nice idea there. That would also fit well with the things about things visual height differing from the area they take on the ground. Alex Schultz ___ crossfire mailing list crossfire@metalforge.org http://mailman.metalforge.org/mailman/listinfo/crossfire
