Speaking of mapping, anyone know how to recompile the .res files?
(Please forgive any typo's/weird english. I have a bad case of food poisoning and its hard to type/think, but I just can't sleep through any more of it.)
Here is why I am asking: Currently, any single map tile is (before an compression/batch processing), 10-23!kb's in size. Mines are even larger, but I don't give a **** about mines.
I still have all of the map tiles for Roanoke, Jamestown and Plymouth. Each of the non-compressed folders are
huge. Or, huge for them just being a bunch of tiny 100x100 images.
Lets use one of my Jamestown backups here, back when it was tiny 2063 tile folder. Its 90.6 Megs in size. It's compressed sister folder (and yes, the maps I had online for people were all compressed, in multiple ways. My methods were to convert them to an indexed color .gif, removing all of the unneeded alpha ****, reconverting them to .png, then combining them into larger 400x400 images.) is still a rather large 30 MB folder.
I've extracted all of images used in the map tiles. There are 33 files that I am fairly certain are used for minimap tiles - gravel.res_0.png I am unsure of of (and the gravel image is 13KB's
in size). If these were all modified to be smaller, cleaner PNG/Res files, the maps would be hugely smaller and easier to work with. It wasn't the AMOUNT of tiles that took me hours to merge, compress and deploy, it was the huge file sizes. Importing in the Roanoke map back when it was only 20k tiles would take upwards of 30 minutes uncompressed. After compression, it was down to 5 minutes or so.
Here is an example tile, pre-editted:
This is 13KB, for a single tile. This single tile also has 1646 colors in it. That single large chunk of lighter green on the bottom? It alone accounts for 281 colors.
Here we have the same tile, hand edited to show what I am trying to achieve:
This is now 2.49KB in size, with 8 total colors, using the same PNG format options that the defaults use. It would be even smaller using indexed colors, with alpha disabled. Still recognizably the same area, but massively smaller in file size.
I'm not sure if many people realized it, but I was also editing out peoples bases from the maps on requests, or if I knew the base was active, this would also make doing that 1000% easier. Matching up the default "I puked on an image file and used it for the minimap" textures to hide bases and make it appear seamless wasn't always easy or fast. Even with a new world, we're not always going to get "virgin" tiles from people.
I've tried Boshaw's Layer util, and tried using the various **** found on Haven's forums, so far no luck. I've even tried different custom clients. It could be a case of "Imri is being retarded", so if someone wants to walk me through re-setting up the layer utility and getting the blasted thing to work, it would be hugely appreciated. I'd like to have these working and available for anyone who wants to use them in time for the wipe.
Edit: Also, one of the people I'll be playing again with mentioned that there might be more biomes added. Those will be pretty easy to modify and add in, too, once I figure this out.