Re: [palito-dev] Re: New renderer

[Tom Barnes-Lawrence]

Hi Barrett (and everyone else of course),
 Sorry I didn't reply earlier, I was far too tired yesterday, and today it's
been boiling hot and too hard to think. But I am still here! :)

On Thu, Aug 07, 2003 at 11:55:12PM -0300, address@hidden wrote:
> Tom, what about making IWR a GIMP plugin?
> Take a look at the 'Land' script that come with it as an example..

 I use Gimp quite a bit, and I've played with those map generator scripts
it's got. But I thought about your idea of turning IWR into a plugin for
Gimp, and I'm not really sure what the point would be.

 The only advantage I can think of would be that you could draw the
input heightmap by hand, and then generate the image for it immediately.
But you'd still want the heightmap kept around for the game itself. Also,
I'd thought that IWR was most suited for batch processing (like called
by some other program, especially in pipelines).

 In fact, one of the main ideas about it was that if Palito included IWR
with it, map files would only need to be distributed as heightfields
and/or texturing functions (the game could come with some default
heightfields and default texturing functions, so new maps would be able
to use any of these). The image file could then be generated relatively
quickly at the start of the game.

 Really, for any maps where you wanted to create the image along with the
heightfield and package it all together, you'd probably want that image
to look as good as possible, so would most likely find a much better
renderer for that (as the time taken in rendering, and any licensing
issues, wouldn't be a problem there).

 Also, when I looked into the .hf format (which you said was from Bryce),
I realised that it's depth (16 bit?) was much more suitable than what I
was using I was using one channel of a BMP file, giving at most 8 bits of
depth. True, I *could* change it to use all colour channels... but I think
that'd then just make it much harder to make heightfields by hand.


 So basically, I don't think it'd be a useful thing to do.

 BTW, it occurred to me: Presumably the byte order of Bryces .hf format
is standardised... but is your .hf file loader OK across machines with
different endianness?

 Tomble
PS- I've not been working on IWR for a while, as I've been working more
on my own game. I'll prolly try to do some more for it now. But I haven't
abandoned it! :)