[Kde-games-devel] mahjongg tiles...

[Mauricio Piacentini]

Wolfgang Rohdewald wrote:
<lots of good feedback>
> the relation should always be the same, otherwise this "horizontal stretching"
> gets it wrong. if that was fixed, it would already look much better. I would
> not have to use a tile with another direction of lightSource and rotate that
> entire tile with its shadows. 

The real issue here is that the tileset rendering/caching/shadow scheme 
was not devised with rotation in mind, really. There is a provision for 
changing the view angle (use the F and G keys and KMahjongg to test it), 
and that is the reason why we have the faces separated from the tile 
body, and also why they are cached separately by the KMahjongg code.

Also, I did not make the width/height ration fixed because artists would 
then be free to do different tiles, depending on what they want. I think 
this is important for them.

So, version 1.0 of the tileset format was not designed with tile 
rotation in mind, simply because the client games using it at that time 
did not need it :)

It is of course certainly possible to extend the tileset format to 
accomodate rotation, but this will require new artwork. Notice that 
artists already "bake" the light into their faces. See for example the 
excellent Jade tileset by Eugene, or Alphabet. I doubt we could get that 
kind of reflections looking so good without manual tweaking, so artists 
would probably need to do the rotated versions of the tiles also in the 
SVG, and maybe specify shadows separately as well.

I am against throwing everything out, of course, specially in the middle 
of a stable series. So when we enhance the format we should make a 
provision so that old ones could be used for clients that support them. 
Eventually code could be ported to use the new format as well, but 
compatibility should be maintained ideally for the 4.x series.

BTW, I just got several dozen layouts for KMahjongg from Alexey Charkov, 
including versions of all that ship with other mahjongg implementations 
(like Vista.) Too bad they arrived a bit late for 4.2, but I will check 
them in for 4.3!

Regards,
Mauricio Piacentini