Type2 Maps Must be At least 400 pixels wide

[Guest MajorH]

>I have been experimenting with the map tool and have come up with some

>unusual results which I would like to try and cure. I suspect it is a

>problem with my system, perhaps the graphics card? and maybe it cant be

>cured, but I would really appreciate it if some of you could have a look

>and give me your opinions.

OK ... I was able to replicate your map problem on my PC. The screwup is on my end as I forgot when I did the map utility that there is a hard coded map width requirement of at least 400 pixels in the Windows version of the game engine.

Your map is too narrow with its current width of 320 pixels (3.2 km). It needs to be at least 400 pixels wide (4 km). I coded the Map Tool to accept a width down to 200 pixels but it turns out that the game engine expects/needs more map width than that. The game engine needs for a map to be wide enough to allow the Windows menu bar to be a single line display. Unless a user has his op system set to use a very large fonts, a minimum map width of 400 pixels prevents the doubling of the height of the menu bar.

I would rather not try again to change this limitation in the game engine. The 400 pixel requirement is an artifact of the Windows menu bar automatically changing itself to a 'double line' display when window width is less than what the width would be of a 'single line' menu bar. I noticed this effect last year while working on a resizing bug and I spent a considerable amount of time trying to code a solution that would work on W95, W98, and WNT. Due to inconsistencies in the ways that the three flavors of Windows handle the doubling of menu bar height and the reporting of window parameters, I was not able to come up with a workable solution to dealing with a double line menu bar in TacOps. So I stuck in a 400 pixel limit to prevent the user from being able to drag a window to a width smaller than that. The fact that the Map Tool currently allows a width less than 400 pixels messed up my game engine bug fix.

At this point it is a lot easier and less risky to change the Map Tool.

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Best regards, Major H

majorh@mac.com