Guild icons in game

[MishkaL1138]

There's something about these guild badges, names, secrecy and such that I'd love to see fixed. And I think I have the solution.

Guild icons.

A simple, small (no more than 24 or 16 square pixels) icon, with bmp format which can be displayed in the player's description or above their heads, depending of how is it easiest to code. This guild badge could be shown or not at the player's discretion, of course as long as the guild is public and not hidden. Maybe players in a hidden guild can show a badge too. The thing would be like this:

- Guild hidden, hides both guild tag and badge: Either no guild, or hidden guild.
- Guild hidden, tag hidden but badge shown: Char pertains to a guild, but only the badge is shown. If you don't which guild does the badge represent that's your problem.
- Guild public, tag shown, but badge not showing: Char pertains to a guild, but it is not known ICly (only known to those the char told ICly, of course).
- Guild public, tag shown, badge shown: That char pertains to that guild. Period.

The default setting would be badge not showing. The players can activate if they want to show their guild's badge or not. Could this be possible?

[LigH]

The Windows BMP format would not be preferable. It is uncompressed and therefore wastes space. PNG is more common as losslessly compressed format. But finally, modern 3D games will require a file format optimized for 3D technologies. That would be DDS (DirectDraw Surface), because it can use DirectX Texture Compression (DXTC) in different variants which are supported by 3D chipsets.

Scaling is only a very little issue, I would recommend a dimension not smaller than 64x64 pixels. Icons in the inventory window have a similar recommendation.

But I doubt that this concept will be supported easily at all, because it would require uploading images to the server, and sharing the image among all clients which "see" this icon for the first time and would probably download a local copy to cache it, and it needs a way to know it it was updated in the meantime; and we would probably want to avoid uploading disturbing and offensive images...

[MishkaL1138]

Well, TGA isn't a bad option either...

[LigH]

It is just as bad as BMP, because it is just as uncompressed and just as wasting space.

[Korumak]

Well if its locked to a "Guild" then it shouldnt be that big of an issue as far as offensive goes.  Set it up so only the Guild leader can say who can 'change' or 'personalize' the guild images.

As far as the format is concerned, I would suggest a format that can be easily created by various imaging programs, like Gimp, or Photoshop, or paint etc, to make it easier for end users.

Personally I as a user haven't seen any graphics programs that use DDS.  I would hate to have to use a another graphics program just to make a guild symbol image. JPG might be crude but it would work. (personaly I woud prefer png files)

[LigH]

JPEG does (in general) not support transparency.

PNG supports it, and it is a very common and rather efficiently compressed image format, suitable for creating and uploading.

But it has to be converted anyway: 3D graphic chips can't display PNG data as texture directly, only uncompressed or DXTC compressed textures. CrystalSpace 3D should possibly contain an own DXTC encoder, but the decision which variant is most suitable (DXT1, DXT1a, DXT3, DXT5) depends on many factors and can't be automated trivially.

Furthermore, the mipmapping is an important detail for an acceptable quality when an image is downscaled for display (remember the halos around fences in the distance, and black trees in the fog, those are errors in the mipmap creation workflow).

Usually the conversion to DXTC is done with specific specialized tools, e.g. the Nvidia DDS Utilities or Texture Tools 2. There is also a PhotoShop compatible export plugin for DDS, as well as one for the GIMP. XnView can export it too (although I am not certain which variant). DDS images must have dimensions of powers of 2 (required for mipmap creation: half and half and half ... down to only one single pixel).

[Korumak]

I been using the Xnview MP for a while, hope it becomes stable soon.  So if what it spits out works, thats fine, cause its free, and i bleave its intended to be so.  So it solves the "Simple" part for the end users. Providing it spits it out in the format thats PS happy.

[Bonifarzia]

Well if its locked to a "Guild" then it shouldnt be that big of an issue as far as offensive goes.  Set it up so only the Guild leader can say who can 'change' or 'personalize' the guild images.

I guess the process of setting up or modifying the icon would be done in a similar fashion as with the guild logos to be shown on planeshift.it.
http://www.hydlaaplaza.com/smf/index.php?topic=40439.msg453649#msg453649

I think I've seen a /guildsymbol command, but I don't have a clue if this is planned to do anything. Personally, I think even a reference to only existing icons (glyphs, map elements, board game elements, weapons etc.) can already be a nice thing. On the other hand, I can think of at least three guilds that would probably use the light glyph then

As far as the format is concerned, I would suggest a format that can be easily created by various imaging programs, like Gimp, or Photoshop, or paint etc, to make it easier for end users.

Personally I as a user haven't seen any graphics programs that use DDS.  I would hate to have to use a another graphics program just to make a guild symbol image. JPG might be crude but it would work. (personaly I woud prefer png files)
[...]
I been using the Xnview MP for a while, hope it becomes stable soon.  So if what it spits out works, thats fine, cause its free, and i bleave its intended to be so.  So it solves the "Simple" part for the end users. Providing it spits it out in the format thats PS happy.

XnView is fine if you just want to view and convert the files.
As a Gimp user, I clearly prefer a plugin.
http://code.google.com/p/gimp-dds/downloads/list
Of course, there are also plugins for commercial software such as photoshop.

Back to the actual use of the symbol. I don't know if it makes any sense to show it near the name/guild tags. If you want your guildlogo to show up in your guildwindow, all you need is a skin which supports that. It should not be hard to find a link to one of these (sig). It is also easy to add this feature to your preferred skin.