An important feature which was implemented a few days ago is the StretchBits trap. It was actually implemented for the first “Stunt Copter” prototype, but as it’s effects are visible in many places, I felt proper to write a separate blog entry for it just to demonstrate a few cases where it had big impact on the content:

Before implementing StretchBits, calls to it were directed as a placeholder to StdBits, which would show the content partially depending on the context, but causing graphic glitches as can be seen. On the Railroad Tycoon map, the “Map” uses both double-size scaling to draw the map, and half-size scaling for the mini-map on the right hand side. Also, the “New Train” screen uses stretching to scale locomotive PICT resources to fit the List Manager list it uses:

Also the text rendering benefits of this, as text can now be scaled to arbitrary sizes, which is quite important when drawing bitmapped fonts in non-exact resolutions, such as in Missile:

The scaling algorithm has some room for improvement, as it for now only has the generic method for scaling bits one pixel at a time. For now, this seems to be enough to allow working on other missing features.