From: <wak...@ea...> - 2005-08-10 06:26:31
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Just checked out all the changes. Wow. It's looking almost like a complete game. Other than the map itself, it looks like you can already use this to manage a game session. This is marvelous. Changing the fixed hexmap is going to be quite a bit of a chore. A quick overview: It all starts in the HexMap class with the 'show' variable. This variable defines which hexes in the grid are displayed. You'll note that I've enabled nearly all of them. The ones that are false are required to be false otherwise the application blows up due to unhandled exceptions. The methods setupHexesGameState() and setupNeighbors() in HexMap, and setupEntrancesGUI in each of the oriented hexmap classes will all need some work in coping with a larger and dynamically allocated map and making sure they're properly being told the correct coordinates. Hmm... I just noticed that setupEntrancesGUI() is still rounding off to integers when it doesn't need to now that I've upgraded the Points to doubles. And so now I'll try and poke at this a bit more... :) One thing I've been looking at is graphics for the tiles. John Galt's Tile Encyclopedia ( http://www.diogenes.sacramento.ca.us/18xx_net/tiles/ ) is one resource for tile graphics. Though, gifs don't scale very well. Is there a way we could get these graphics converted into SVG? I'm thinking a vector-based format is ideal. ---Brett. -----Original Message----- From: Erik Vos <eri...@hc...> Sent: Aug 8, 2005 2:08 PM To: rai...@li... Subject: [Rails-devel] Changes I have committed a bunch of (minor) changes: 1. The UI package is cleaned up, several unused classes have been removed. 2. I have restructured parsing of CompanyManager.xml to avoid duplicate parsing code in CompanyType and Company. CompanyType now builds a "dummy company" with all the properties of the <CompanyType> element. During parsing of each <Company> element, first that dummy company is cloned, and then the contents of <Company> are applied. This way, <CompanyType> creates a default which can be overridden in <Company> elements of the same type. Of course, <Company> must at least contain a company name! 3. GameTest now creates an extra MapWindow, containing either an E/W or a N/S oriented map, as appropriate for the game. The relevant HexMap subclass is specified in Map.xml. Currently, just Brett's fixed maps are shown, the rest of Map.xml is ignored. I will try to work on that next. Erik. |
From: <wak...@ea...> - 2005-08-11 05:16:35
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> 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. |
From: Erik V. <eri...@hc...> - 2005-08-10 18:49:45
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> Changing the fixed hexmap is going to be quite a bit of a chore. > > A quick overview: > > It all starts in the HexMap class with the 'show' variable. > This variable defines which hexes in the grid are displayed. > You'll note that I've enabled nearly all of them. The ones > that are false are required to be false otherwise the > application blows up due to unhandled exceptions. > > The methods setupHexesGameState() and setupNeighbors() in > HexMap, and setupEntrancesGUI in each of the oriented hexmap > classes will all need some work in coping with a larger and > dynamically allocated map and making sure they're properly > being told the correct coordinates. > > Hmm... I just noticed that setupEntrancesGUI() is still > rounding off to integers when it doesn't need to now that > I've upgraded the Points to doubles. > > > And so now I'll try and poke at this a bit more... :) 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. > One thing I've been looking at is graphics for the tiles. > John Galt's Tile Encyclopedia ( > http://www.diogenes.sacramento.ca.us/18xx_net/tiles/ ) is one > resource for tile graphics. Though, gifs don't scale very > well. Is there a way we could get these graphics converted > into SVG? I'm thinking a vector-based format is ideal. 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. Erik. |