RE: [Rails-devel] Changes

[<wak...@ea...>]

> I've created a new, provisional data/1830/Map.xml (not yet checked in)
> and I intend to use this in creating a game-dependent hexagonal
> grid in the MapWindow.

Sounds good to me.  I look forward to seeing it.


> Please have a look at Marco Rocci's tile designer 
> (see http://www.rails18xx.it/software.html)
> from which I have just exported 6MB of SVG files:
> all tiles in his database in all 6 orientations
> (although I think we really need 12 to cover both EW and NS-oriented maps).

> But I don't know how to use (or even view) SVG files. 
> IrfanView cannot read this type of file.
> I've downloaded the Adobe SVG viewer, but it does not seem to work,
> either in IE or in Firefox.  This applies to both the 3.0 and 6.0 versions.

That's right. I'd forgotten about Tile Designer.

I threw out SVG as a possible format, but it's not absolutely necessary we use it. 

A few things I like about SVG: 

- SVG defines the graphics in XML format
- SVG graphics do not lose any quality if they are zoomed or resized or rotated
- SVG integrates with other W3C standards such as the DOM and XSL

A big win here is that we don't have to worry about resizing our graphics affecting the quality of the image. So, I would much rather use a vector-based graphics format if we can get away with it.

The other win is that we'll only need 1 file for each tile. The SVG interpreter ought to be able to rotate the image on the fly.

A quick google search shows me that there's Batik ( http://xml.apache.org/batik/ ), which is an SVG Toolkit for Java. I'll check that out and see if it'll allow us to display SVGs in our game.

---Brett.