Image caching problem

[The Purple Panzer]

I think I've stumbled on to what might be a significant bug in the newest bzflag client.

Background: recently I've found bzflag too boring to play for any length of time - indeed this has led to a bit of avoidance of play on my part. Rather than just complain, I thought I'd do something about it, so I designed a map that would be worth hanging out on for a while, just for its own sake: it's a kind of art gallery. Even if you don't want to fight, it should be amusing to look around.

When I connect to the game, a *really weird thing happens*: some of the images don't show up, while others do. On consecutive runs of the client, *different* images don't show up, and ones that were missing now appear. (Also, on startup, I see different numbers for the number and total size of the image downloads). I can't find any pattern to this behavior. I'm using the BZFlag2.0.10RC1 client

When I run a server locally, so that I can see the server output in a local window, and with various debug levels, I've seen no errors or warnings. When I start the client, it tells me it's reading in the textures (sometimes it tells me there are 59, other times 5, and the total size runs up to 3,428, 4,030, 4406, 4541 KB, or some othe number. I never see any indication of failure, that is no "can't read texture ..." that occurs if something is screwed up. It looks like all is fine; but upon entering the client, I see various paintings missing, often sometimes (this is most annoying) the plant images, which are often partly transparent - when they are missing, grey rectangles appear, instead of foliage.

What makes me think that this is a bug is that on different client invocations, *different* images are missing. Again, there are no error messages - the images just never make it into the client.

optic_Delusion suggested clearing my cache, and making sure it is set to be large enough, and this seems to have largely (though not always completely) fixed the problem. So it looks as if there is some problem in the image caching in the client.

The map is up now on one of my servers; it's called "Museo", and it's at 1purplepanzer.hopto.org:4610

[anomaly]

I have noticed that most of the images do not have an extension. They all look like .png's though. Maybe there is a problem properly identifying the image format. Almost all of the images in the artmap directory are extension free. Some of the images don't load for me either. But they do download.

Looks cool though!