Wesnoth map bbCode discussion

[Simons Mith]

One used to be able to attach maps on the forum itself, and they would display inline. Is that feature still available? I haven't seen it used in ages. Presumably it doesn't work with the new map format. Could it be updated, or is it simply deemed no longer worth the hassle to maintain?

EDIT: Split from the original "by the way" comment at this post -- shadowmaster

[Iris]

One used to be able to attach maps on the forum itself, and they would display inline. Is that feature still available?

Yes and no. I believe the code is still around to avoid breaking historical threads in an awkward fashion, but nobody should use it with post-1.4 maps.

I haven't seen it used in ages. Presumably it doesn't work with the new map format. Could it be updated, or is it simply deemed no longer worth the hassle to maintain?

It actually works with our current map format in principle, although its last revision was made before arbitrary ^overlays were possible, so it wouldn't work with many 1.6 maps, for example, because there is no longer a fixed list of mainline terrain types, and there's instead an overwhelmingly long amount of possible combinations that increase every time a new overlay is created. It'd become a mess to make that code work with 1.6-1.8 mainline terrain maps, let alone think of 1.9.x with the ever-increasing amount of available overlays.

What would be possible, in theory, would be to redesign and reimplement the forum map code to address all of its current shortcomings, but that would require such a huge investment of energy and time I'm not willing to take over the task by myself. I suggested the original coder to update for 1.6's overlay changes, but I never really got a positive response.

If anyone wants to start a serious effort to rewrite the [ map ] bbCode implementation (maybe using some kind of prerendering with ImageMagick this time?), feel free to contact me, but only if you already have ideas and a working prototype. I'd advise to make the implementation less dependent on existing terrains at a particular point of time, for example, by parsing the terrain.cfg code from SVN trunk, or a particular branch, when specified. I'm thinking of something like [ map ] (trunk) and [ map=branchnumber ].

I'm splitting this btw, since my response became longer than I initially expected..