I just had a thought. (Hopefully this one isn't as ridiculous as the last one I had!)
The WALL element [STREAMLINE] is able to map beautiful and smooth lines of air velocity and pressure, even with the 4x4 grid. I'm assuming it simply takes an average of the surrounding tiles, but the fact that the result can be extremely responsive and smooth is really encouraging. In effect it would be a comination of Jacob1's and Tapmemer's suggestions.
@The-Fall (View Post) That's a bug, I was playing around with the air sim and forgot to change it back to normal size :P
I've been looking at this, and to allow the user to change the cell size, the actual size (CELL) would need to be dynamic. It's used in a lot (a LOT) of places, so that's something of an issue.
However, allowing the user to recompile with a different size, but still load saves with any CELL size, shouldn't be too difficult. Only changes to the loading algorithm would be needed; saves already encode their CELL size, so saves with a larger CELL would need their data granularized during loading and saves with a smaller, finer CELL size would need some kind of averaging applied during loading.
Note that it also wouldn't be too hard to allow TPT to be started with a "cell size override" command line argument. The CELL #define could be replaced with a global variable, perhaps?
I'd be happy to try and contribute the relevant code.
I would have a suggestion, but it would be very much a giant piece of work for you and other developers:
Create a kind of "High Power" Version of TPT, for test purposes.
The rewrite would use the 1x1 grid, and only that option so toggling does not become and issue, hand that version out and open a thread (maybe even a new section?) to get feedback from people (With their machine configurations of course) so we can see just how demanding this would be for PCs.
I personally would assume that around 6 fps would be the best that version can do, but thats me being pessimistic.
It's actually not too much work, IIRC it's literally one preprocessor macro that has to be changed.
That's a compile-time change of course, it wouldn't be possible to just "change" in the settings menu. And it wouldn't be vanilla anymore, i.e. you couldn't even open online saves on the official server unless they were uploaded from your version. And the list of reasons why this is not done too often goes on endlessly and these reasons are scattered far and wide on the forum. Too lazy to round them all up.