Creating a fake map image file

Gandalf Parker · #1 July 19th, 2008, 12:48 PM

You might offer a number of different well-chosen maps from the various map generators, and support players creating their own .map files to go with them. Thats the only thing I can think of.

llamabeast · #2 July 19th, 2008, 01:15 PM

Thanks Aezeal!

Gandalf - yeah, I think that's the best plan really. Maybe down the line I could allow upload of whole map images, but there's the potential for problems there. Not least is the fact that the LlamaServer's web server is provided by a volunteer student group, so I want to leave as small a bandwidth footprint on it as possible.

Ballbarian · #3 July 19th, 2008, 02:29 PM

Try this llamabeast:
Create a cross-platform program that your users can download (or run from a browser) that will change every pixel to black except for the pure white province markers. Then have them upload the resulting image.

I have attached a "minimized" version of the silent seas map image. The file size goes from 2787 KB to 50 KB. If you are able to automate zip file decompression as well, have the user or your distributed application zip the resulting "minimized" image and it will squeeze down to 2 KB.

I have not tested the map image in game yet, but I see no reason why it should not work. I have attached it to this post for anyone who wants to try it out.

Hope this helps!

llamabeast · #4 July 20th, 2008, 05:17 AM

Ha, that is a very cool idea Ballbarian! I may very well end up using that.

Gandalf Parker · #5 July 20th, 2008, 04:29 PM

Hmmmm I was working on a command-line to the fantastic ImageMagick tools to do that. Or maybe a ghost-script to GIMP.

The purpose was actually to turn a map into one with just borders and pixels that could be used as an online view to have the national colors automatically filled into the provinces to show game progression. But I can see a use here also.

llamabeast · #6 July 20th, 2008, 04:48 PM

Oh wow Gandalf, if you could whip that up for me that would be really amazing. I was thinking about how to carry out Ballbarian's suggestion but had just about decided to give up because I couldn't face learning the necessary skills to modify the map.

lch · #7 July 21st, 2008, 01:58 PM

I'm really surprised to hear that putting random white pixels into a map image doesn't work. What exactly is going haywire with that approach? Anybody care to give me an example?

Quote:

Ballbarian said:
Try this llamabeast:
Create a cross-platform program that your users can download (or run from a browser) that will change every pixel to black except for the pure white province markers. Then have them upload the resulting image.

Another possibility would be to do this on the client side when they want to upload the image. Here are links to open source file upload applets in Java which you might be able to vandalize to add the desired functionality:

http://sourceforge.net/project/showf...group_id=59144
http://www.aasted.org/ (don't let the name "Coppermine java image uploader" scare you away, it's probably easier to get it working even without a Coppermine gallery installed than to implement an image uploading applet from scratch)

Quote:

Gandalf Parker said:
Hmmmm I was working on a command-line to the fantastic ImageMagick tools to do that. Or maybe a ghost-script to GIMP.

I certainly don't want to curb your enthusiasm, but while it's very powerful in terms of functions that it offers, I've found out that ImageMagick or at least its bindings through PythonMagick is an awful sluggish piece of *bleep*.

I could give you something in Python which does this in PIL, that would be about 5 lines of code. Somebody actually even asked exactly for this a couple of weeks ago on the image-sig mailing list. You could even chose to build binaries for any platforms you'd wish to support with that. But speaking from experience, if the process is too complicated, like this sounds, I'd say that people wouldn't bother to use it.