I can't say for everyone and every situation, but most of the times PIP us used as minimap, where you zoom out so you can have and overview of planet or whole system so you can see who travels where. The problem is, windows is already tiny and considering the zoom, you can't see any models, just icons, BUT it feels like all the models are still rendering which results in huge performance drop if you are not playing on top rig. So basically, if you use your PIP as galaxy map, every planet you see there is the size of 4 pixels at best, but it will be rendered as a whole (all the trees, terrain, all your units, every single orbital if you have deep space radar and all the enemy units you have vision on). My suggestion would be to add another button to PIP toolbar, which will turn PIP into simple mode, in which it will not render any models and only show icons instead (this is a must), and planets will be shown as colored circles, like unbuilt planet in system editor (this should be tweakable in options, because you might actually want to see terrain). I'd really love to use PIP as galaxy minimap on large systems, but the FPS drop is so huge, I can't do it. Option like this will serve two purposes: 1) allow users with slower machines to take advantage of all the tools 2) make cleaner looking minimap, that doesn't clutter screen with too much details. What do you guys think? Will it be useful? Is it hard to code?
I don't think it would be necessary to make the planets not render, simply removing the units, structures and trees should be enough. However, I don't think that it is that that causes most of the lag.
