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#63 Background maps needed
Motivation & Proposal:
Real game board maps consist of a stylized map and a grid overlay, whereas, in 18xx, there is only the grid overlay. Playing 18xx would be more attractive if that stylized map could be displayed as background image (behind the tile grid).
Assessment Costs vs. Benefit:
It would be very easy to get appropriate map backgrounds - e.g., the images could be taken from BGG. In addition, I suppose that it's not a big deal to add that image in Java into the map frame.
Hence, I think that this feature request has a favorable cost/benefit ratio.
This is a long-standing wish. However, now that we are only using SVG tiles (which scale very well) and have implemented zooming, I believe that a map graphic should have SVG format as well.
I'm not familiar with creating SVG files out of other graphic formats, and so I can't comment on the feasilibility of creating such maps.
Perhaps the following would be useful to you.
Online sites for converting gif or jpg to svg:
http://foo2bar.com/image/Gif2Svg.html
http://www.enetzwerk.de/svg/index2.html
I've tried them out: They create an svg with incline base64 image coding - should be pretty efficient:
<image width="1024" height="815" xlink:href="data:image/jpeg;base64,...../>
At bgg, there are plenty of nice looking maps - example which you could use for prototyping:
http://www.boardgamegeek.com/image/573603/1830-the-game-of-railroads-and-robber-barons?size=large
The graphics would probably need an overhaul (removing cities and preimprinted tiles) - but for a first step, one could live without that.
Sounds good. Preprinted tiles and cities should *not* be removed from the map, instead the current preprinted tile display would be suppressed.
Awaiting submissions!
Map proposal for 18EU has been sent to the rails-devel mailing list.
An alternative for converting bitmaps into svg is http://vectormagic.com/
The advantage of that site that it appears to fully vectorize the bitmap to regain structural information that had been lost when saving the original bitmap in pixels.
That will not work if the bitmap is an arbitrary image, of course.
Background maps are possible now, however not all games are supported yet.
Changed to a higher priority