Fwd: [Enigma-devel] SVG images?

[Erich Schubert]

Sorry, this mail was meant to go to the list.

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Erich Schubert <address@hidden>
Date: Jun 2, 2007 11:12 PM
Subject: Re: [Enigma-devel] SVG images?

Hi,
I don't think that will work for everything. It might work okay for
textures such as grass, but Icons are always made for a particular
resolution with a reason.

Icons and graphics - particular text, but in general anything with
horizontal or vertical lines - will look best if these are *exactly*
on the border of a pixel.
If you have a circle, you can render it at pretty much any resolution
and it looks good. But if you render a box, it will look best if both
the lines and the line widths are aligned to pixels. For fonts this is
somewhat done automatically, this is called hinting.
For icons this doesn't work as well. Depending on the resolution, you
might actually want to use quite different icons, just to be able to
preserve the important aspects of the picture.

This of course becomes less important at large sizes, nor does it
apply to real photos.
I think it's mostly applicable to sub 32x32 icons, maybe only to 24x24
or 16x16 and below.

Have a look at the Tango icon gallery
http://tango.freedesktop.org/Tango_Icon_Gallery
Take the first icon for example. Note how the books perspective was
left away at 22 and below? Or how carefully the @ sign was pixeled for
that exact resolution?
Similar things apply to pretty much any icon. The "document-open" and
"document-save" icons are other good examples.

I certainly wouldn't rule out that it works for some graphics, or even
most. But probably not for all. I'd also like to encourage graphics
artists to actually use SVG when making their graphics:
It definitely should be possible to use SVG graphics as "source" images.
For now, we can of course generate the in-game graphics from SVG
source images, and once we have a serious stock of SVG imagery add
support for that file format.
(Or add it right away, if someone writes the code, of course).

That way we can find out which graphics work good with SVG and which
need pixel art.

best regards,
Erich Schubert
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