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I am drawing lots of textures and panning and zooming in and out on them. When the camera zooms out they look really ugly.

What can I do?

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Did you try generating mipmaps? – bummzack Apr 14 '11 at 12:04
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Might also help to provide some screenshots of what exactly you're talking about. Could be a couple things, but as bummzack said, probably mipmaps. – Leniency Apr 14 '11 at 14:33
imgur.com/a/pdzdS theres zoomed in and zoomed out – tm1rbrt Apr 14 '11 at 15:03
That texture is a bad example, no matter what, its tiled, it will always look strange zoomed out (esp since it has a distinct pattern) – Daniel Apr 16 '11 at 8:22

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Yup, looks like mipmaps. This looks like it might be a good resource on how to add them in. Once in though, you can manipulate the filtering - try enabling trilinear filtering or anisotropic filtering.

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gluBuild2DMipmaps is a bad function to suggest. If you are targeting OpenGL 2, you should use GL_GENERATE_MIPMAP. If you are targeting OpenGL 3, you should use glGenerateMipmaps. – Joe Wreschnig Apr 14 '11 at 18:51
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Also, for preference, don't even bother with online generation. You can generate mips offline pretty easily, which only adds around 30% to your texture sizes, but saves a ton of loading time. You can also experiment with alternate shrinking filters to achieve the look you want (sharper, softer, etc). As for filtering: if you're only doing 2D screens, don't bother with anything but linear: anisotropic filtering is for coping with changing mip levels across a single polygon, which can't happen if you're orthogonal to the camera. – Chris Subagio Apr 14 '11 at 19:03
Online generation is still useful if you're doing dynamic textures. Some 2D APIs I have worked with will automatically atlas as you load (under the premise a 2D game is more likely to load lots of small textures, and the artist burden of manually atlasing would be large), which requires online mipmap generation. – Joe Wreschnig Apr 14 '11 at 20:01
Made my answer a community wiki - haven't done openGl in years so others can suggest better resources in the answer if they want. – Leniency Apr 14 '11 at 20:36

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