Re: Thoughts on terrain imaging

[mskala@ansuz.sooke.bc.ca]

On Tue, 23 Nov 2004, Eric McDonald wrote:
> user account so that you can be added to the project as a 
> developer. I figure this might be easier than you submitting a 
> bunch of patches which people would have to apply if they wanted 
> to test out your work.

Okay - I'll sign up for one.

> For the per-cell case, you may want to implement new layers. I 
> believe that the 'aref' and 'aset' macros in 'world.h', IIRC, 
> would be worth looking at. (Layer allocation is handled elsewhere.)

Yes - that's one of the things I'm looking at.

> Regarding the bug reports: if you're offering to fix the bugs, 
> then that's great. If you would like some help fixing them, please 
> add them to the project's bug tracking system on Sourceforge, and 
> I will try to help you clear out some of them.

I'd like to spend a little more time trying to figure out what's going on
with these before I decide whether I can fix them easily myself, or want
to file them for other people to look at; I was just commenting about them
on the list in the hope that maybe you (or some other reader) would
instantly recognize either the bug or the mistake I'm making in the GDL to
cause the incorrect behaviour.

That image-rescaling code (which I've looked at a little more since
writing my last message here) seems to be a real dog's breakfast.  There
are a couple of points where it seems to be testing for error conditions
in the very next line after that code that guarantees that the error
condition can't happen, and there are other points where a comment
explaining what's about do be done is followed by a line of code that
clearly does something else.  I think those are signs it's been tweaked
and patched several times in the past, and it may be that the best thing
to do might be to simply rewrite those routines - not a project I had
contemplated as part of the map-image feature addition, but one I'm
willing to tackle if it turns out to be necessary.
-- 
Matthew Skala
mskala@ansuz.sooke.bc.ca                    Embrace and defend.
http://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/