Generating end-of-game Map Animation

[munk]

I wanted to start putting together the ideas for creating a new Map Animation generator for the new Longturn site, as some interesting ideas have been floated here: http://forum.longturn.org/viewtopic.php?pid=669#p669.

Notes:

1) my previous map generator was suited for small-map games and focused on telling the story of unit movements by coloring units/cities by owner and omitting territory ownership. It used 6x6 (36 px) to represent a map tile and it's contents.

2) the old pubserver map generator I believe used the existing Freeciv ability to generate graphic maps that used 1px to represent a game tile, it focused entirely on territory ownership and represented cities/units as white dots (similar to the mini-map in the game).

3) I think the new map generator should tell both stories (territory ownership *and* unit ownership/movement. To accomplish this and keep the map size manageable for games like the huge-map LT30, it has been suggested to use a tile size in-between 1px (too small to show unit ownership) and 6px (too large for LT30-sized map). Perhaps 4X4 (16px) or 2x2 (4px) would be a good size.

4) To begin, a set of savegame files from a completed LT30-type game must be studied and experimented with. Maybe if LTeX23 is ended soon, those files could be the test files we use to develop and test our ideas. We would need:
a) Freeciv civscore log file (civscore.log)
b) Freeciv ranklog file (generated at game end) (ranklog)
c) FreeCiv savegame files (complete set, named {$prefix}-T{$turn_number}*.{$ext})

5) Initial ideas for graphic representation:
CITIES: White square against territory color indicating ownership
UNITS: White square with color dot in upper left corner indicating ownership
TERRITORY: Colored by ownership (pubserver-style)
SEA: ? (i used dk blue)
LAND: ? (i used grey)
(consider color pallette complexities posed by needing 70+ different ownership-indicating colors, and how sea/land needs to be different enough to distinguish)

[munk]

another consideration: the info lines showing player color, score, gold, research, etc. can't be represented in the graphic for 70 players (not enough room). Should consider making the generator script create individual map frames per turn plus a datafile with this extra player info, then developing a javascript/jquery viewer with back/forward buttons that renders each map frame and outputs the player data as text. Possibly integrate this into "completed game" page.

Example of info lines within graphic: