Improved rendering of zoomed out views

[hpg]

When zooming out in-game the sprites don't get scaled very nicely (same as the original game). I'm guessing this is because the whole game is currently limited to its 256-color palette, but if it's ever capable of rendering the entire full-resolution map and then scaling it with more color depth and a bilinear or bicubic algorithm the zoomed out views would look so much better. 

For example, here are two screenshots of the same overview of G Force's Westwinds. Top is the in-game view, bottom is a giant screenshot scaled to the same size in Photoshop.

 

Now, there are some obvious performance implications here. This could easily be just a pipe dream on my part, but I've seen high enough frame rates with the OpenGL renderer to think that it could be possible on a fast enough machine. Anyone else know enough about the drawing engines to comment on the feasibility of this?

Cheers,

-hpg

Edited October 8, 2017 by hpg

[jensj12]

Iirc, when zoomed out, the game just picks one of the 4^zoom level pixels and draws it on the screen. The photoshopped one calculates all 4^zoom level pixels and combines them. So when zoomed out 3 times, it costs 64x as much to draw it on the screen.

[hpg]

Sounds like that means it's unlikely to happen any time soon.

This gives me a slightly different idea though. It wouldn't be quite as cool, but what if it automatically rendered a high quality view like this when you pause the game while zoomed out? That'd still be a pretty sweet feature.

Edited October 9, 2017 by hpg