picture in picture, possible?

hi again!

so, i had this idead of a sort of scanner, for a top down project im making. the scanner would be located out of the screen, but it would project its content on screen. sounds simple, but.. is it possible to achieve a picture in picture? the reason why i thought of this was that i originally thought about having a zoom out option,which would be really simple and easy, but upon testing the performance takes a hit, because theres more stuff on screen when zoomed out. so, i thought this would serve a purpose, while not having to render all the needless stuff on screen around the player, just the area the player is "scanning".

anyway, i quickly threw an example pics together in gimp to better illustrate this idea im trying to achieve. heres the pics:

is the minimap object able to do something like this or do i need to resort in dark rituals to achieve this? <img src="smileys/smiley36.gif" border="0" align="middle">

or should i just take the potential performance hit and make the zoom out layer- trick instead? (im trying to save performance as much as i can this early on)

any advice would be appreciated!

Sure, take a look at pasting objects into the canvas object, and then using R0J0Hound's TextureSet plugin to copy the canvas texture to a sprite on-screen (or, just graph the objects into canvas, and move the canvas back onto the screen to display it).

It's a little tricky to do it the second way, but that's a way of doing splitscreen as well: Splitscreen up to 4 players CAP

i checked that .cap and i must say, thats one big combo of code to get around my head <img src="smileys/smiley36.gif" border="0" align="middle" /> but useful in the future im sure, ive always toyed with the idea of making a splitscreen game..

i kinda guessed that it has something to do with the canvas object though. gonna go fetch that texture setter plugin and see what i can come up with. thanks for the hints, i kinda understand the logic now. ill come crying back here if i cant make it <img src="smileys/smiley16.gif" border="0" align="middle" />