Zoom levels off?

[Seipher]

Is it just me or is the zoom from fully out to the next one in a bit too much? Almost feels like there's a zoom level or 2 missing.

Zoomed all the way out it feels a bit to far for me and the next zoom level in feels slightly too close haha

[Rayvolution]

There's not actually, in fact, it's actually the other games you've played that are missing some zoom levels

The big problem is in pixel art games you have to zoom at even ratios else the graphics will be distorted (eg; 1:1, 1:2, 1:3, 1:4 etc).

Whats going on is between 1x zoom and 2x zoom you're switching between a 1:1 pixel ratio and a 1:2 ratio, making each 1x1 in-game pixel take 2x2 of actual real pixels on your display, +75% increase in pixels space used.

But, from say 2x to 3x, that's 1:2 to 1:3, roughly only 56%.

At 3x to 4x, that's 1:3 to 1:4, roughly only 44%.

This means every time you zoom in one level it gives the perception each time you zoom in you're zooming by a smaller amount (and technically, it's true), but there's no logical way to do 1:1 -> 1:1.5 to smooth it out, as it'll ruin the graphics, you can't scale 1x1 pixels to 1.5x1.5 pixel space because that's physically impossible since there's no such thing as "half a pixel", thus, the larger percentage shifts (1x -> 2x) look much bigger than the smaller ones (6x -> 7x).

Most games solve this by simply removing some zoom levels. Like where RtR allows 1x, 2x, 3x, 4x, etc all the way down, most games offer something like 1x, 2x, 4x, 8x, etc skipping a few. This would make the zoom levels feel consistent between each of them because 1:1 to 1:2, 1:2 to 1:4 and 1:4 to 1:8 are all the same percentage of scaling between them (+75% each time). I just opt'ed for the slight-weirdness so players have more camera control.

The alternative to the 1:1.5 pixel problem is to allow it anyway, and use anti-aliasing to smooth it all out, but that's sadly not a realistic option for pixel art games. :)

Hopefully that all made sense, a bit hard to explain these concepts text-only. :)

[Seipher]

I did think it was something to do with the increments of zoom ratios and the pixel graphics.

But yeah this made sense, thanks for taking the time to replay man.