"i whould suggest something (dunno if it was already suggested) about the minimap. It is slow and heavy and is full of details. Yesteday i've tryed to take the minimap and convert it into png 256 colors. I didn't see any change and the size of the pic is strongly lesser.
Here an example of a map with lots of colors. (i've take a swamp that have much colors)
-----Png Normal (41,0 kb) --------------- Png 256 (19,8 kb)------
I didn't tryed GIF 256, but is the same. They keep Trasparency to put patterns if you need.
If you wanna be more cool, you could create your own Palette and all the minimap don't need more than 256 colors.
I repeat, i dunno if someone of you already suggested this, but i know there was a thread somewhere. I didn't found it, sorry.
Any extension you use (gif-png-jpg-bmp-tif..or more) i think you could use the 256 colors of Photoshop. They cut a lot of size and dont ruin anything because the minimap don't use so many colors."
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"Good idea, been bothered by laggy minimaps as well. Did you test the difference on all types of ground though?"
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here a try. I've toke one of the maps posted on the map topic. It was jpg but was the best i found quickly.
Honestly the 256 colors work nice also here, look down.
Map png Normal -- (214 kb)
Map png 256 -- (81 kb)
Bytheway, i hope that the items on the minimap aren't fused with the land Image. Minimap should be faster if all the items (trees, houses etc) are little icons saved inside the client and the server tell to the clients the coordinates where those should be showed. The only graphics server should give you, then, will be the lands and some text.
In any case the 256 colors whould be a nice improvement, if arent already used or if the minimap isn't in an extention that i don't know and all this posts are useless.
This topic is for Devs, but i needed to create a topic about it.
