Quote Originally Posted by Mark Oliva View Post
The GIMP produces raster images, not vector images, and those raster images certainly are in layers. However, the native format .XCF files with layers that The GIMP produces are not bitmaps. The GIMP certainly can export the content of its .XCF raster images as bitmaps, if one wants a bitmap in the end. And in fantasy RPG cartography, that's usually what one wants.
You confusing bitmap the generic term for arrays of pixels with bitmap the file format as in a windows.bmp file. Windows chose to make the file format named 'bitmap' to refer to the arrays of pixels when at the time of Windows 16bit there were not many image file formats about. So Gimp is definitely a bitmap editor.

For Hernan, You probably know this and I am not sure what language or OS your intending to write this new app in but I believe that if it is for Windows (given the target of 32bit) then it may be that MS make the C/C++ compiler free for 64 bit if you take the version without the maximum amount of optimization. Its been a while since I made Windows apps but I think it was called Express or Community edition. The GUI for the free visual studio compiler at the time when I looked at it was not free. I am not sure what the state of that is now. Also for Windows there is the MinGW system where you can compile it using gcc to create 64 bit apps on windows. I thought that if you were writing in Java then the JVM would be 64 bit anyway - but I am no Java coder.

Final thoughts are that even if you write a 32 bit app which has limited memory to 1, 3, or 4 Gb of memory depending on the machine set up, its still possibile to write it multi process where each process has that limit and you can transfer data between processes. Also, its not a fundamental limit of the bits / RAM that determines how many layers you can handle and if an app is written so that it targets the idea that many layers is going to be used then better handling of the memory could prevent the issue. Gimp is super lazy about how it manages the images that it holds.

Also, for Mouse, if you have layers that are greyscale (shadows, masks etc) then do set the Image / Mode to Greyscale instead of the default RGB which should quarter the amount of RAM Gimp will allocate for it. But 10K x 10K x greyscale x 135 = 13.5Gb of RAM uncompressed and if they were RGB then that would be 54Gb of RAM required. Not many image editors are going to handle that and CC3 is not going to either if those are genuinely bitmap layers your referring to.