Re: IMFApp Office

[Eric McDonald <mcdonald at phy dot cmich dot edu>]

Hans Ronne wrote:

> There are actually two completely different ways to draw terrain in Xconq:
> as tiles or as individual images.

I had gathered that from browsing the IMF's a few days ago, and also 
previously from noticing that some terrains were drawn as squares (as 
with colors) in IMFapp, but others, like the Civ2 terrains, were drawn 
in hexagons.

> Now, if IMFApp does not find a special "tile" image (which it will never do
> in the case of a unit) it will make one from the available image and use it
> as a tile. That is why the background unit images are trimmed to 32x32
> size. They were converted to "tiles" before being used to draw the
> background.

OK. That is fine for a technical explanation of what is happening, but 
it still not very intuitive from an user's persepctive, I think.

> I would add that the whole tile drawing machinery is semi-obsolete, a
> remnant from the time when Xconq did not have true images. The best way to
> draw terrain is certainly the latter, 

I would agree; it seems that that would be less computationally expensive.

> One could of course make IMFApp draw backgrounds by using individual images
> instead of tiles, 

This is more like what I had expected.

Eric