eleazar wrote:You couldn't end on something rounder than 7.45 so we can do the conversion easily?
We could, but 1.25 is a nice amount to zoom per step, and 1.25 ^ n isn't a nice round number for any value of n other than 0.
What about the steps below default zoom? Are there still 4? down to IIRC 25% of default?
There are still four zoom steps out from default, each of each shrinks everything by a factor of 1.25, which gives a final shrink factor of 0.41 = 1/1.25^4. The old max (min?) was, I think 0.35.
More steps can be added above or below the current max and min, as well. I think there was a bug a while back that was causing crashes when zooming in or out too much, but I think that was related to font sizes which shouldn't be an issue now, as long as the font size doesn't change too much with zoom level, and never goes below the renderable threshold, whatever that exactly is.
We could also possibly make the zoom step sizes not all uniform multiplicative factors... So the zoom levels could be, for example, 0.25, 0.5, 1.0, 1.5, 2.0, 3.0, 4.0, 6.0, 8.0. These could probably be made configurable in a text file an/or the GUI, as well. This would take a fair bit more coding to make happen though...
Alternatively, I'd like to have the zoom be completely free, so you could pick any factor, without being limited to preset steps. We'd need another way to control the zoom for this to work though, since the mousewheel only moves in whole integer clicks. I'm in the midst of adding a slider to the map that will let the player zoom without using the wheel or hotkeys, but there are some issues with how the slider works that I'm waiting to hear back from tzlaine about. Ideally the slider could be moved with arbitrary precision, but the way the background starfields are positions would make this look very strang when zooming slowly through levels.
Also, I'd like to add a distance indicator to the map that shows how far some distance on screen is in universe units.
Both the slider and distance indiactor would be similar to those of google maps, for example.
EDIT: It occurs to me that the cube root of 2.0 is pretty close to 1.25, and the cubed root of 2.0 raised to power of any multiple of three is a nice round number... I think I'll switch the scaling factor to that. This means the max zoom factor will be 8 again, with 9 steps in. The min zoom factor will be 2 ^ (-4/3) which is about 0.4, although that can be made bigger or smaller.
In other words the system circle— no matter how it is adjusted— bounds the click area for a system? If so, that's what i want.
That's how it works now.