Re: [Rails-devel] Tiles.xml, TileSet.xml, and svg files

[Phil D. <de...@gm...>]

I'll second Rick and say thanks for the detailed reply, that really
helps to understand how the system fits together :)

Phil

2010/1/11 Erik Vos <eri...@xs...>:
>
>
>    This may another one of those "I should not go there" type of questions.
> If so apologies in advance.  Or I may be missing something obvious.  At the
> moment I am learning the source of Rails via experimentation rather than
> intensive reading of the code.
>
>  Feel free to ask any questions; however, I can't guarantee that the answer
> is always welcome.
>
>                A tile for a given game is defined in three places:
>
>    The per-game TileSet.xml seems reasonable as it has a list of the tiles
> in the given game, quantity of tiles, upgrade path, and which SVG picture to
> use.
>     The per-game Tiles.xml has the same list of tiles but this time with the
> colour of the tile (not the actual color on the time but the color phase),
> how many cities and towns and their positions;  values of the cities/towns
> and a list of how the track is laid out (e.g., from side 0 to side 2, from
> side 1 to side 5).
>     The whole-rails SVG files have the graphics for each of the tiles.
>     Now for a given tile the relationship of the tile's SVG file and the
> tile's entry in Tiles.xml is fixed.  In other words I can not a take a tile
> in the Tiles.xml file and change its track layout from 'side 0 to side 2' to
> 'side 0 to side 3' and expect that the tile will show up properly.  Instead
> it will retain it's SVG representation.  Ditto if I try to change the number
> of cities or their position.   So ... why not have a global Tiles.xml file
> with three items in it and reduce the duplication across the games?   That
> would make the per-game Tiles.xml smaller and more readable (and thus easier
> to debug).  And/or combine the reduced per-game Tiles.xml file into the
> TileSet.xml file thus reducing another source of duplication and error.
>
> 1. Why do we have separate TileSet.xml and Tiles.xml?
>
> TileSet.xml contains the game-specific tile properties, and Tiles.xml has
> the game-independent tile properties. The latter file is generated by
> rails.util.MakeGameTileSets (a stand-alone Java class/program) from
> TileSet.xml and the overall Tiles.xml file that has *all* tiles (this file
> and several other files that I'm going to mention are in directory
> 18xx/tiles of the CVS repository on Sourceforge). This program also checks
> TileSet.xml against Map.xml for consistency.
>
> 2. Why do we have separate XMLand SVG files? That is because we use an SVG
> renderer that understands SVG, whereas both I and the Java code I have
> written only understand XML. And I doubt if the twain will ever meet.
>
> 3. Where do Tiles.xml and the SVG files come from?
> Ultimately everything comes from a tile database named TileDesigner.18t
> created by Marco Rocci's TileDesigner program (see
> http://www.rails18xx.it/software.html). In the mean time I have added a lot
> of tiles to Marco's original tile set. From that database I export both the
> SVG tiles and an XML descriptive file called TileDesigner.xml.
>
> The SVG export is somewhat buggy. Originally Brett fixed that by a procedure
> that I don't have the details of. I have recently taken over and I'm now
> using a procedure described in the comments of a Perl script named
> CombineTiles.pl. That script builds the Rails SVG file set by combining
> parts from three sets of SVG files:
> - tiles with ID > 0 (layable tiles, the ID is printed on the tile).
> - tiles with ID <=0 (preprinted tiles, no ID on the tile; this is a separate
> export from TileDesigner)
> - special tiles that I have modified manually with Inkscape (such as the red
> off-board tiles -901 throught -903, which TileDesigner cannot create with
> "arrows". So for these tiles the XML does *not* exactly correspond with the
> SVG!).
>
> The XML export (TileDesigner.xml) is converted by another Java program/class
> named rails.util.ConvertTiles into the overall Tiles.xml that I mentioned
> before. I'm doing this conversion because I think that the latter format is
> better suitable for use in Rails.
>
> 4. Why is this procedure so complex?
> Well, we're doing the best we can with the limited knowledge and imperfect
> tools that we have.
>
>             BTW#1:  Is there any routine to display all of the SVG files?
>
> No. Only TileDesigner has everything.
>
>     BTW#2:  The README in the 'tiles' directory says that the XML files in
> said directory are not important.   IMHO it should also say that the svg
> sub-directory is critically important.   As you can imagine by my comment it
> took me a while to realize the importance of said directory
>
> It doesn't say that these aren't important, it only says that these are not
> [directly] used by Rails. These files in fact do form the basis of the
> per-game tile sets, as I hope I have explained well enough above.
>
> Erik
>
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