Hacky work around/ Thoughts?

[Kalnar]

I'm working on a top down game where zooming is very important for gameplay ect...

This game uses the physics Extension and allows players to build things.

I have a plan that I'm working on implementing but wanted to run this buy some experienced minds as I realize it's a hack solution and there may be performance or other issues that this solution causes, or someone might have a better solution.



As MMF does not "zoom out" past the screens resolution I devised a work around where I use the viewport object to zoom and swap in higher rez player object pieces at the proper locations so the players (rez up) as you zoom in.

The problem is that as the players are made of multiple pieces and as physics are very important in my game I need each of those pieces to have physics. Saddly in order to "zoom out" enough I need total player length to be as small as 16 pixels making it impossible for each piece to have accurate physics or in most cases any physics as at that zoom level some pieces are invisible.

So my plan is to make the board much bigger then the level:
For example say a frame of 48000 by 48000. I will then build my level in the center 1/8 or center 6000 pixels with the lowest rez of objects (the backdrop objects do not need to zoom that much so I'm not swapping them in with higher rez things just the players and npcs)

I will then at the start of a board run a loop that creates all the chipmonk physics based on the objects origins but much larger (more accurate) and displaced by the correct ratio of pixels.

In the end the player will be moving physics objects in the 4800 pixel space but all actives will be moved by setting there position to that of there physics body *.125

With this sollution I'm still only calculating the physics and the visuals once each. Though I realize it's not ideal can anyone see any huge problems this would cause?

[Joshtek]

if you want to zoom out past the window size you can increase the size then make it smaller using the Window object. You seem to want to zoom out a lot tho.

[Kalnar]

Window Object?

[Kalnar]

Hi. I tried using the window object.

The only way I could get the app to zoom out by say 1/2 at a 1240 x 1024 res is to set the frame window with the windows app to 2560 x 2048 and then use the viewport object to set the source region center to 1280 x 1024 Width 2560 Hieght 2048.

Using the Viewport and Window objects together I could get it to zoom out but it is REALLY slow. With only 2 objects and one quick backdrop object my framerate on a quad core droped to 25. 0_o

Am I missing something could I just zoom out with the Window object?

[Kalnar]

I think setting the position of objects based on the position of other objects is totally doable. Perhapses a better question would be:
Does a Frame Width and Height of 30,000 pixels sound like it would cause performance problems? (keep in mind only 5,000 x 5000 pixels will have viewable objects while the rest of the pixels will have the physics for the objects)