[Arralen]

what will not work with DOM2:

• using any other format than .tga, at least unless the developer add support for it with a patch. I#m not shure, but I think the SDL library supports other formats as well, but than there's still the problem that other routines have to read the graphic file as well.
• compressing/resampling/resizing the map pics with any paiting programm, unless doing lots of work by hand or maybe someone could write a script for Gimp
  This is because provinces are detected (and flag graphics shown) by pure white pixels (255,255,255/1x1). Making a .jpg from the .tga will result in artifacts, which will shurely kill some of these pure white dots here and produce some more there .. provinces screwed up badly. Resizing/resampling will do basically the same ..
• changing the resolution. In fact, the resolution set in the graphics file doesn't matter at all. (You may set it to 72 dpi or 305 dpi, however you wish. DOM works based on pixels, not graphic size in mm. Changing the number of pixels is resizing/-sampling and will screw up the map. (see above)

What will work is :

• using just sufficient size (in pixels) for each province so that everything on the map is displayed where it belongs, and leaving out any non-map/province areas from the file
• using few (256) colours when making the map. Using big, flat single-color areas doesn't look that neat, but keeps the file size very low, especially as the RLE compression works better the more uniform an image is.

I resized and modified my old DOM1 map, so I have gone through all this hassle before. BTw., did anyone check this map out? Despite being 1600 pixels wide, it's only 1,6 MB big ... . I'm working on an extended Version at the moment, I'll post it (link) when it's finished.

A.

edited: code & spelling, but it doesn't help much..

[ January 10, 2004, 06:36: Message edited by: Arralen ]