So basically I was wondering what techniques were employed in 3D games to rectify the issue of, in this example, a 40x40 tile getting reduced in size to 24x24 and therefore scaling the tile down to the point where it simply becomes blurred and loses all quality - as demonstrated in the images above. I know that there is physically not much you can do about this because the fact the camera is hovering high up above the ground, so you can't stop the tiles from appearing smaller.
I was wondering though, what would be the best way to get more detail into the tiles, is it simply to just have larger tiles in the game? The programmer and I have had several discussions and he seems to be under the impression that we need to use smaller tiles for performance reasons.. I was thinking to have something around 64x64 tiles, not sure what they do in other games?
Any advice would be good..!
Edit: Just to clarify, the image above of the tile is not meant to be seamless, it was just a quick test to demonstrate the loss of quality