I got tired of recompiling my game program to try out different foreground/background texture combinations, so I built a little test program onto which I can drop images for testing.  I’m going to download a bunch of textures and put Debra to work picking out good combinations.  She has a much better sense of esthetics than I do.  I’ll probably add the ability to select textures and tile sets to the game itself, but not for the first version.

When building the test program I ran into a problem with Delphi that I had forgotten about:  there’s no Borland-supplied support for GIF images.  Not a problem–I searched for “delphi gif” on Google, and in less than five minutes had GIF support in my program.  The solution I found is the TGIFImage component by Anders Melander.  Not only does the component appear to work flawlessly, but it’s very well documented.  I download and examine a lot of code from the Web, and rarely do I run across anything so thoroughly documented.  The Web site is chock-full of information about the component, LZW compression, other GIF components, and the JEDI initiative.  The full download kit includes much of this information and a very instructive demonstration program.  If you need GIF support for Delphi or C++Builder, definitely check this one out.