[engine] Generate black backgrounds for art on install?

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sacred_chao
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[engine] Generate black backgrounds for art on install?

Post by sacred_chao »

I noticed the Wesnoth install has gotten huge and I also noticed that there seem two be two versions of all the artwork - one with a black background and one with a transparent background.

Is it possible to generate the black-background versions dynamically on install instead? It seems like it'd save a lot of bandwidth.

Alternately, is it possible to just, when necessary, throw a black square behind the transparent version using the engine itself?

Thanks.
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Re: Generate black backgrounds for art on install?

Post by Iris »

Been suggested before*.

* The artists and one UI developer wanted to kill me for that.
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sacred_chao
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Re: Generate black backgrounds for art on install?

Post by sacred_chao »

shadowmaster wrote:Been suggested before*.

* The artists and one UI developer wanted to kill me for that.
Heh. Well it was a good suggestion (if not necessarily an easy one to implement :)).

Please feel free to close this and redirect to the thread where it was already discussed.
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Re: Generate black backgrounds for art on install?

Post by thespaceinvader »

When GUI2 comes finally to fruition, we might conceivably be able to do away with the blank background versions entirely, I hope. It's a long way away yet, though.
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Re: [engine] Generate black backgrounds for art on install?

Post by pauxlo »

The black-background versions are used in the help, the transparent background versions are used for ingame dialogues. They have different sizes, and automatic scaling would often reduce quality, thus the artists feel it is better to include both in the download.
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Re: Generate black backgrounds for art on install?

Post by Iris »

sacred_chao wrote:Please feel free to close this and redirect to the thread where it was already discussed.
Nah, it was on IRC.
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Re: Generate black backgrounds for art on install?

Post by silene »

thespaceinvader wrote:When GUI2 comes finally to fruition, we might conceivably be able to do away with the blank background versions entirely, I hope. It's a long way away yet, though.
It doesn't have anything to do with GUI2, as it's just a one-line change in the engine to use one or the other. As pauxlo and shadowmaster explained, some artists were against downscaling portraits, so we had to ship both size.
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Re: Generate black backgrounds for art on install?

Post by Sangel »

silene wrote:
thespaceinvader wrote:When GUI2 comes finally to fruition, we might conceivably be able to do away with the blank background versions entirely, I hope. It's a long way away yet, though.
It doesn't have anything to do with GUI2, as it's just a one-line change in the engine to use one or the other. As pauxlo and shadowmaster explained, some artists were against downscaling portraits, so we had to ship both size.
The problem is that automatic downscaling alone produces inferior quality compared to the selective cropping/downscaling. In theory, one could have a system which allows cropping and downscaling choices to be set on an image-by-image basis, with the parameters given by the artist. But that would require a lot of work on both the coding side and the art side, coding up the system and then going through each image and setting the correct parameters.
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Re: Generate black backgrounds for art on install?

Post by silene »

Sangel wrote:
silene wrote: It doesn't have anything to do with GUI2, as it's just a one-line change in the engine to use one or the other. As pauxlo and shadowmaster explained, some artists were against downscaling portraits, so we had to ship both size.
The problem is that automatic downscaling alone produces inferior quality compared to the selective cropping/downscaling. In theory, one could have a system which allows cropping and downscaling choices to be set on an image-by-image basis, with the parameters given by the artist. But that would require a lot of work on both the coding side and the art side, coding up the system and then going through each image and setting the correct parameters.
There would be a bit of work on the coding side, sure. But I don't understand why it would require a lot of work on the art side. Why would it be more work to set the cropping/scaling parameters in Wesnoth rather than in Photoshop/Gimp when you create a portrait?
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Re: [engine] Generate black backgrounds for art on install?

Post by ancestral »

If only we had vector-based artwork and an engine which could display SVG. Then we'd have scalability :D
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Re: [engine] Generate black backgrounds for art on install?

Post by thespaceinvader »

If only we had a billion dollars and 20 professional artists and I had a pony.

Pretty big 'if only' :P
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Re: [engine] Generate black backgrounds for art on install?

Post by Sangel »

thespaceinvader wrote:If only we had a billion dollars and 20 professional artists and I had a pony.

Pretty big 'if only' :P
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Re: [engine] Generate black backgrounds for art on install?

Post by bigkahuna »

Sangel wrote:Every young illustrator should have a pony!
He's old. And I'm on a horse.
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Re: [engine] Generate black backgrounds for art on install?

Post by kitty »

For I was one artist rejecting a similar idea at one time, I wanted to explain my reason here again: At that instance it was about a automatically rescaled version for the campaign selection dialogue, but I imagine it being similar for resizing and putting on black - The example I saw, was simply not acceptable because the edges were all visibly pixelated… But if there was a way to get that done in a good quality I'm all for it! And defining some kind of parameters or whatever for each picture would seem perfectly acceptable to me as well.

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Re: [engine] Generate black backgrounds for art on install?

Post by Captain_Wrathbow »

If Kitty forfeits her pony, I claim it.
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