map formats on TMWserv

[5t3v3]

Hi, I don't know if this is already set or not. But I thought there might be a lot of practical benefits in choosing which ways the maps are coded.
To illustrate what I mean, consider the old coding for eathena:

Code: Select all

...
<layer name="Collisions" width="200" height="130">
<data encoding="base64" compression="gzip">
H4sIAAAAAAAAAO2Z2Y7dOAwFM/f/P3qQBwOGI8laSB7KKgIFTDq3tZCn7O7M7/fnzw8AAAAAAAAAAAA+xb1WPgOwMxGlviNAL+pS3x+gRNZS9wXOZpdS9wnOYsdS9wzOYOdS9w6+x9dK3U/4Dl75VJe6r7A/Xy91f2EfTi91/yEvX6/eO6rnALmg/i31TEDPzhVxB...

This makes for low readability.
Consider the following alternative for a small 10 by 10 map

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...
<layer name="Collisions" width="10" height="10">
xxxxxxxxxx
xxxxxxxxxx
xxx----xxx
xxx----xxx
xxx----xxx
xxx--xxxxx
xxx--xxxxx
xxx----xxx
xxxxxxxxxx
xxxxxxxxxx
...

Of course as we start using more and more tilessets, each with more tiles in it, one character/tile wouldn't do it. And we could have 2 or 3 characters/tile. (2 characters=> (26+10)^2 combinations=1296 different tiles; 3 characters => 46656 combinations)

The practical benefit,
1. It makes it very easy to fix mapbugs in textformat if you know where to look.
2. It makes it a lot easier to copy parts of maps when one map overlaps the other.
3. Experienced mappers can even map entirely from texteditor.
The downside of course would be that the mapfiles become a lot larger, but I don't know whether this increase in length would really cause any problems, since textfiles don't really take up much space.

[Jaxad0127]

EAthena doesn't use that map format. The client and TMWServ do.

[5t3v3]

EAthena doesn't use that map format. The client and TMWServ do.

Oh ok thx for the correction, but eitherway, still seems like something worth considering?

[Crush]

The tmx file format is the native Tiled map format. Any improvement suggestions to it should be directed directly to the tiled development team.