Author Topic: New features to .pms  (Read 1783 times)

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Offline rainrider

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New features to .pms
« on: July 31, 2008, 04:51:07 am »
I saw somewhere few nice ideas, like 'Explodes' or 'Only alpha team collides' polygon types. I also think of gravity polygons, which would gently lure player with predefined speed to themselves. You could make these polys inside of deadly polys, under flags, just imagine that. And there's many other amazing stuff out there, in your brains.

But I heard everything would affect map file too much. Well.... Polygon type is stored in byte variable, there's much room for other values than existing ones. I saw .pms file format structure, bah I've reversed it back in the days. And I'm shocked. There are 8 useless bytes per vertex and 36 per polygon, which gives totally 60 bytes. And I have no idea what the hell they do. The rest is pretty obvious: polygon type and 3 * texture xy, vertex xy and rgba. I don't know, these 60 bytes may contain important information about collision, sector id, translated xy.. whatever. But hell, that can be computed when map is loaded. Wait, not 'can'. Should!

What do you think?

I think that many ideas are nice and compatible with old map format, because no data needs to be touched / moved - only new values to be available. I think of that like of a revolution comparable with one when polygon alpha channel was implemented. I think that our developers should add new features for maps. And -finally- I think it's a must.
:D

Offline jrgp

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Re: New features to .pms
« Reply #1 on: July 31, 2008, 07:49:12 am »
I agree! But unfortunately I highly doubt MM will ever get the chance to read this topic. Another good idea completely wasted. :(

heh, I just had an idea. What if the pms file format was converted from what it is now to XML, kinda like SVG. The file could be gzipped so it would take up less space. Wouldn't that make adding new features a fuckload easier?
There are other worlds than these

Offline iDante

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Re: New features to .pms
« Reply #2 on: August 01, 2008, 12:47:58 am »
I totally agree.
Not much more to say here...

heh, I just had an idea. What if the pms file format was converted from what it is now to XML, kinda like SVG. The file could be gzipped so it would take up less space. Wouldn't that make adding new features a feckload easier?
How would that make it easier... we're trying to NOT have to change the actual map format here.

Offline ramirez

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Re: New features to .pms
« Reply #3 on: August 01, 2008, 03:36:22 am »
Yes it'd make add new features easier, XML is easily extensible without breaking existing code. But it'd require a complete rewrite of the map related loading/saving stuff. I wouldn't really store polygon data in XML though, even when compressed it'd take quite a bit more space than the current format.

Offline Norbo

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Re: New features to .pms
« Reply #4 on: August 01, 2008, 10:33:31 am »
What to say... f12 :)