2020-02-28 Unverse Restarted

[expert700]

Later...

I apologize for the Friday evening restart of the servers. Two related problems were causing servers to crash and it would have been a long weekend if I tried to nurse them along.

-snip-

Empire Flag Size
A request was made to increase the size of empire flags.

Empire flags can now be up to 256x256 pixels. To compensate for the extra pixels, flags are now reduced to an indexed palette automatically. This can result in graininess if the picture is very detailed. Normal flags reduce fine. The sample flag on the new empire window is the reduced result, so you can see before submitting it.

You can change your empire's flag on the Policy page of the Governance window. Just click on the flag there.

You will need a new client program to use larger flags. It is building as I write this and it will be posted when ready. The client update was not essential for the server update so I decided not to wait for everybody to be built at once.

Thank you for bumping the flag resolution up. Just to let you know, however, your system to reduce the color palette seems a bit dodgy. It turned the areas of my flag that were solid red into an alternating pattern of bright and dark red. Compressing it down to 256 colors in GIMP first before uploading it fixed that though, so not a big problem.

EDIT: Turns out there are some minor scaling problems