Infinite zoom

I’d like to create a scene like when you zoom out or in when looking at our universe. As you zoom out, which seems very large, a solar system is replaced with a single icon. As you zoom in, that icon changes to the larger solar system.

How can you change the scale to some degree to allow for this? Is it a camera setting? Do you just change the scale() of the pictures (which doesn’t work well for points, I’m using sprites)? Or is there some other method that allows you to transition while maintaining a zoom scale. I don’t want to make my images 10000 height by 10000 wide and set the height and width of small things to 10. This just doesn’t seem like the right way to do it.

How can you change the scale to some degree to allow for this?

I’m not sure I understand what your problem is here.

First, get scaling to work right, so that you can zoom in and out freely. That’s simply a matter of the X and Y scale factors in your projection matrix.

The next step is to detect when the zoom factor is close enough to the point where you stop rendering icons and start rendering objects. This is something that should happen in your “render solar system” function. You test the zoom factor. If it is close enough, you render the actual solar system. If it’s too far away, you render an icon.