Panther has been discussing with me the prospect of creating a windows-based alternative to runtiles. I have looked into it enough to have questions.
As I understand it, all'y'all create the H tiles first, which is the largest resolution. Then the tiles are reduced in size to the smaller resolutions, M, L, and T.
My questions:
1) Would it be OK to run the alchemy.exe, using the windows program as a easy-to-use front end?
2) If not, does anyone know how to perform color resampling? This seems a thorny problem. For example, assume we have a 4 x 4, 4 color block that looks like this:
1 2 3 4
1 3 3 3
2 3 3 3
4 1 1 2
If we want to make it 2 x 2, either information is lost, or resampling takes place. Losing information is easy. I could make the example:
1 3
2 3
by tossing away 'even' bytes. However, I don't know what colors 1, 2, 3, and 4 are, so I lose any chance to blend colors.
It seems to me, that if you guys like alchemy, then it ought to be used. Otherwise, you will get the new algorithm I decide on.
Am I overthinking this?
Dave
