Blur effect in terrain render
 

Within the constraints of the map terrain generation method, could a blur effect be applied to smooth the pixelization at full 'zoom'?
At the moment I'm looking at ground textures not buildings, trees etc.
I am not familiar with WinSP code but generally I would expect it to be an issue of if the game would blur the RGB values with a kernal instead of a more modern post processing filter.

Is the map being generated from data on each pixel or is there a true 'tile' that is a big byte of code? If one took the basic tiles of the open, rough, bare, mud...etc, applied a blur to soften the pixels and then recompiled that into the source could a smoother ground at maximum zoom be achieved?

Re: Blur effect in terrain render
 

The simple answer is no. I could type for an hour explaining why and Andy could probably do the same but I don't have that hour and I don't think he does either especially given you want some blurred and some not

I don't want blurry terrain anyway and in all the years we have had this in the game I have never had an issue with the look of it

Re: Blur effect in terrain render
 

Thanks for a prompt reply.

Re: Blur effect in terrain render
 

The third party dll that does the graphics is a very early version of DirectX - Dx5?

As its a third party black box which we cannot change, and such effects (pixel shaders?) werent even thought of at the time, then its a definate nope.

Re: Blur effect in terrain render
 

The original game displayed terrain for each zoom level from a unique SHP file and as a result, adding new terrain was a ROYAL PITA as each different tile had to be manually reduced and expanded and put in its own files. About a decade ago that was changed and now all the Terrain tiles are reduced or expanded from Z4 and all the terrain SHP files but the Z4s' are redundant and not used (Z4 is the 1:1 standard ).

That was how the Icons were made larger and smaller depending on the zoom and we applied it to terrain. We believe it was done this way in the 1990s to lessen the memory used back in the day when available memory was not nearly as abundant as now and computers were considerably slower.. having a tile in each size made loading zoom in/out faster

So... the code uses that Z4 to create the smaller and larger tiles needed to zoom out and in but as Andy noted the code that does that is not something we could change even if we wanted to

Re: Blur effect in terrain render
 

Thanks for the clarification and insight.
I was not envisioning a heavy blur, maybe anywhere from 6% to 20? Just enough to blend the ground pixels. It would also produce an visual processing depth effect by having the background blurred and leave the vehicle/troop/gun at the current style of render. Trick the eye into a 'closer is focused/distant is unfocused visual effect.
So basically zooming in is just magnification of an BMP with no resampling or increase in PPI. Interesting. I shall have to think on this.

Re: Blur effect in terrain render
 

The base shape that is rescaled is resampled by the graphics module using some sort of technique - its not just a simple blow-up i believe - some anti-aliasing is in there. But that is a third-party software library, not ours.