Re: [Rails-devel] tile rendering objects

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

>Well, if you are going to display it on the screen you can't stop them 
>from printing it anyway.  Besides that, there are plenty of sources for 
>tiles to print if they want to go about it, including my own website 
>which allows them to download EPS for the tile.

Agreed.   At the same time, I'd like to be careful of the games we're cloning that are still in print and/or have large corporate copyright holders that won't take too kindly to any efforts to republish an out of print game.

I'm less worried about the games that have been published by various members of the 18xx community.

So, at this point, I don't want to change any implementation plans. I just want to note that, in the future, we may need to have a mechanism to segregate out certain games for certain features. We'll cross that bridge if we come to it.

> Right, but implementing the drawing primitives shouldn't be hard.  It has 
> been a while since I did anything fancy in Swing but clipping is the only 
> one that might be an issue.

Exactly. 

Java.awt.Graphics and Graphics2D has everything we need for drawing. 

I think the biggest conversion will be that the java API doesn't use polar coordinates, AFAIK.

> Another output that might be of interest would be SVG or an image 
> (although that is probably better served by taking the PS output and 
> generating a bitmap from it) for web display, as a sort of status update 
> on a PBeM game.
 
Definitely. 

You may want to take a look at the server-based UI that Erik has been maintaining. It's the GameTestServlet in the /test directory. I'm not certain how current it is, but it's an example of a server-based implementation using the same underlying engine.

It's probably a good candidate for using the tile parsing classes out to SVG.

---Brett.