Having a fixed view (ie. number of game tiles visibly fitting onto your screen's resolution) is a little inconvenient at times when your character has boosted view range or you just want to quickly travel via mouse clicks over known ground - and I'm playing on a 1920x1200 monitor! On my laptop, all characters would be effectively crippled from being unable to see or target any significant distance on the north/south axis. This is an old, obvious, and game-breakingly bad design choice. I can think of literally no reason for there not to be a zoom-out toggle. The sprites are already being scaled up and everything! Please, enlighten me before I drive myself mad here.
Scaling zoom against sight radius on the fly has always made sense, but I suspect the reason it hasn't happened is the same as anything in dev - it just wasn't written at the time. That said though, I remember something being said a bunch of versions ago about completely changing some of the image code, maybe the previous version made this sort of thing impractical.
If this is changed at all, I wouldn't expect it to be before either a) the first patch to Clockwork Empires is released, or b) Dredmor's code is opened up to us. Since Gaslamp doesn't have the coder availability of a AAA house, priorities are as they are.
Dredmor isn't hardware accelerated as-such. If it was, this would be trivial. If it was built from the beginning with the ability to arbitrarily scale, zoom, and pan in mind, it would have been done. But it wasn't built like this at all. Implementing this would require a complete re-write of Dredmor's rendering code which would be A Lot Of Work. (Funny story: Dredmor was originally made to be at a fixed 800x600 resolution. Nicholas had some weird ideas in 2005, and honestly had no idea Dredmor would turn out to be as big as it did. I'm really glad, at least, that we made the game sort-of resolution independent.) Edit: (And yeah, it does suck. I wish this was otherwise.)
Oh well, at least you'll now know what to go for if you ever end up wanting to make "Dungeons of Dredmor 2" or anything similar.
The build that I'm playing with right now actually is kind of centered around the Perception skill, which doesn't do much good if you can't see the line of sight that it gives you. It basically makes the main idea and purpose of the perception skill kind of pointless... Wait, so if the sprites are being scaled... would it really be that much work to create a toggle to let the player turn the scaling on or off in-game, but still keeping everything else like the menus and health/mana display the same size? Or maybe, if it would be easier, to put a toggle for the sprite scaling on the startup screen, so the view could always be "zoomed out"? That would honestly solve the problem enough for me, and maybe whoever else out there wants to be able to play with more line of sight.
The answer is probably "yes, it would be". Development involves assumptions. The earlier an assumption is made and the more stuff is built on top of it, the more ballast it acquires against efforts to dislodge it later. Coding around such isn't always possible, and has a tendency to make things worse for subsequent changes.
