New map rendering system scheduled

This task is in planning and in alpha development, and it will slow down the overall development.
The current rendering system is tile-based. The design was quite simple, but it has a couple of disadvantages:

  • Too many images have to be loaded (about 100 average)[/*:m]
  • The downloading, sorting and rendering procedure is too heavy and some browses (like IE) freeze during the grid update[/*:m]
  • The smallest detail available is 32px. That means, the player's base point was not always in the center and there is no way to create quality animation[/*:m]
  • Dynamic objects (like signs) had to break down their image into tiles before the rendering procedure[/*:m]
  • Animation GIFs have to be exploded into 32x32 pixel tiles[/*:m]

That's why a new system is under development. The new system will use layered images instead of stacked tiles, but this means that most of the game code will be changed.
So, no serious updates will occur on the following days or weeks...

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