Creating Minimaps

[tux9th]

Hi
I have a question. I created a few maps yet and I only made 2 minimaps so far. I just read the minimap tutorial on the wiki and now I'm not sure if I did my minimaps correct.

I just made a picture with tiled and then downsized that to the tiles of the map. so a 150x150 tiles map got a 150x150px minimap image.

On the wiki it says you have to edit it with gimp etc. Is this still done, is this still necessary or is it just plainly outdated?

greets tux

[Reid]

It's useful to edit it with GIMP as there will still be some random pixels which will get out of sense due to the resize of your map, I wonder how TMW is doing their minimaps, but you can try to remove some fringe tiles and some variation tiles which would be useless to this minimap.

The main point while cleaning your map with GIMP will be to keep things clear, nobody want to see if there'll be a small rock at a given location, they just need the general look of the map.

But then, I'm not from the graphic team (nor the mapping one) from the mana world... ^^'

[v0id]

Take a look at this.

[Crush]

Maybe it wouldn't be a bad idea to add auto-generated minimaps to the client. The client could easily scale each tile down and then draw the minimap image with the downscaled tiles. These auto-generated minimaps could be used as a fallback on all maps which don't have a minimap image defined, so that server administrators can still use artistic minimaps when they want to. It should also be possible to define the minimap image as empty, to suppress the autogenerated minimap on maps where a minimap would break immersion (like town indoor maps).

[o11c]

FWIW, I wrote the black-and-white minimap generation for ManaPlus and even that was a pain. I've come to hate SDL.

For oversized tiles, just de-oversize them. You know when loading the map how big the biggest oversized tile is, so you can always scan that many more tiles to the bottom/left.

An alternative approach might be something like this: do a buffered stream and ensure that you can backtrack over N rows when an oversized tile is drawn. Of course, this has the disadvantage for over-*wide* tiles.

Actually, considering the problems just mentioned, the best solution would probably be to eliminate the oversized tiles in a preliminary pass, before you start loading tiles at all, and just abort if any oversized tiles in the same layer overlap each other ... we don't use that, right?

[o11c]

As input it needs a client-data folder,
<...>
With a regular expression can be controlled what maps get rendered.
<...>
[*] It works only for a limited amount of maps. Even with just 200 maps the gui gets overwhelmed. Luckily this affects only Invertika, for which Cartographer would be unsuitable anyway, since it has 2864 maps.

Why not only generate minimaps for files explicitly listed, and only keep one in memory at a time? (If you rely on garbage collection this may be problematic)

And have a command-line only version. We can push to a fork on github to visually compare the images.