Re: [Slashem-discuss] servers

[J. A. H. <al...@av...>]

On 2002.12.30 00:57 Andrew Apted wrote:
> J. Ali Harlow writes:
> 
> >  1. the start-up process which takes a lot of bandwidth since
> >  the complete tileset plus a tile map has to be downloaded (plus lots
> >  of other things, but these are the biggest items). For the 32x32
> >  tileset that's 2.8Mb + 57Kb (more for the pseudo-3D set and less for
> >  the 16x16 set).
> 
> 2.8 MB ?  That's pretty big.
> 
> The SDL/GL port uses PNG, which has the following sizes:
> 
>    32x32 set: 527473 bytes
>    48x64 set: 610826 bytes
>    16x16 set: 124066 bytes
> 
> That's one option (I don't know if GTK can load PNG, if not
> there's code in win/gl/gl_image.c you could adapt).

Yup. This is certainly worth doing - I don't think there are likely
to be many platforms that plug-in interfaces will run on that don't
have support for PNG (and besides, there's nothing to stop a server
admin using a non-default file format if so desired). I'll commit
a patch to change this. If you don't mind, it would probably be better
if tile2png was in util since it's now generic.

> Another option is to only download tiles as they are needed.

True, but this is really only speading the load out so that the user
doesn't see the start-up lag. While we may want to add such a facility
for obscure situations, for most cases the tileset should be located
on the client-side even if this means the plug-in interface caching
it from the server automatically.

-- 
Ali Harlow                              Email: al...@av...
Research programmer                     Tel:   (020) 7040 4348
Applied Vision Research Centre          Intl: +44 20 7040 4348
City University                         Fax:   (020) 7040 5515
London                                  Intl: +44 20 7040 5515