[MUD-Dev] Re: Terrain/Landmass & GIF/BMP

[Hal Black <hal#moos,ml.org>]

On Wed, Oct 07, 1998 at 02:49:03PM -0700, quzah [sotfhome] wrote:
> Greetings everyone,
> After finally generating a world mass, I need a way to "see"
> what it looks like. Even on a very small world (500x1000) in
> ASCII form, it will be very very hard to get an over all look
> at the world. I was thinking that if there is a simple way to
> output to a GIF or BMP, then I'd be able to just open up the
> picture in a paint program and "see" what the world looks
> like. Does anyone know of any good links that explain how to
> output either "x number of bits" or "x number of bytes" to a
> GIF or BMP? (PCX would even work). Currently, each piece of
> info on the land mass takes up 20 bits, so I can either drop
> it down to 16 bits, or bump it up to 32 bits for the use of
> GIF/BMP (Yeah, I know GIF is 8bits, I THINK I can lower it
> enough to be able to use a GIF format).

I suggest looking at the PPM format (portable pixel map)  It is a very
simple format, and I have used it for maps I've made.  In a nutshell,
you output the color values one after another for each pixel.  There is
a binary and even an ascii text mode.  The header is a very simple.

You can view and edit these PPM files in various unix paint programs
(gimp, etc).  Paint shop pro, and I think photoshop, for windows also
supports it.

Sorry, I don't have any references handy.  Search the net for references to
netpbm and ppm.