Registered Users

[loftar]

The main problem is actually the textures, which don't compress very well in PNG. My original idea was to give the minimap a "hand-drawn" look, but Jorb insisted on this "illuminated manuscript" look. The current minimaps look very nice, I'll agree, but "hand-drawn" ones would probably compress far better.

It would help using JPEG, of course, but, well... blech.

Anyway, the server has a much larger hard drive now, so it shouldn't be a problem for a long time. I have also written a program to GC old, unused minimap images; I just couldn't use it previously since the filesystem turned out to be using non-indexed directories.

[Jackard]

last world, i was able to shrink the 8MB supergrid to like 600KB or something

all you have to do is replace the dumb and ugly textures with solid colors in PNG or GIF :\

at least the minimaps are less ugly now. remember all the black outlines? haha

[sabinati]

yeah i'd prefer solid colors i think to the current textures for water and things, and i mean, png has transparency so i guess you could overlay a separate parchment texture or something... idk

[warrri]

Original Minimap

16kB

JPG converted

10kB

Or if you insist on png

13,6kB

The difference is small, but since there are many minimaps and since you stated the lag is caused by minimaps it may help?

[sabinati]

is that 24 bit png? have you tried 8 bit png? various types of gif? bitmap?

[warrri]

Im currently on it >_<
I dont have any professional tools here, im using irfanview which has limited cofiguration options.

Gif result is 8kB

You may notice that the white Field points turned black.

Edit: You can of course save the original minimap and do some tests too
Edit2: The original PNG is 8 bit.

[theTrav]

my compression technique involved firing it up in photoshop, then converting to indexed colour with a tiny pallette size.

For the map fragment you posted, I'd recommend 4 shades of green, black, white, 2 shades of black.

then saving as a PNG should be roughly the same as saving as a GIF.

Loftar, If you wanted to go nuts at making sure they display all fancy good you could have one colour per region and use black as an outline colour, then apply your textures to the regions as separate layers when rendering.

Having said all that I don't know that it's really worth the bother unless you're getting serious size/performance issues out of it... you'd be far better off implementing offline village management *NUDGE NUDGE*

*NUDGE*

[sabinati]

well i will mess around with some minimap bits tomorrow

[loftar]

well i will mess around with some minimap bits tomorrow

Don't worry too much about it on my account. As I said, we now have a much larger hard drive to begin with, and I have written a program to GC old minimap images, so it shouldn't be a problem. If it really becomes a problem, I'm sure I'll be able to think of something then. :)

The main reason I really couldn't do anything about it before switching hard drive was, as I said, that it turned out that I had formatted the old filesystem without directory indexing.

[Chakravanti]

village management *NUDGE NUDGE*

*NUDGE*