Spring RTS Engine

i'm sure some of you have noticed that when compiling, the game lobby minimap is always just a shrunk version of the texture map with no indication of water level at all. ex: small supreme

i have a trick to prevent this. open your map, press f5 to get rid of the hud and what have you, then take an overhead screenshot. resize it to the size of mini.bmp in your compile directory, and overwrite mini.bmp

right click mini.bmp and set it as read-only. now compile. the compiler will get to the minimap, give a little error box (cannot write mini.bmp!) click ok, and it will proceed to use your version of mini.bmp

(i think the file is called mini.bmp at least, i'm not on my mapping computer though, so correct me if i'm wrong)

Awesome!!!



I just tried it and it works great!!

EDIT:

However it will also change the look of the ingame minimap

it does??

i'm pretty sure the ingame minimap is dynamically updated, IE when you shoot off a nuke and make a new lake it shows up on the ingame minimap

the water looks a tad darker now..

now that you mention it i think tangerine's water in its ingame minimap did darken up a little bit.

that's very weird that happens, i have no idea why the dynamically updated ingame minimap would have anything to do with the lobby minimap. i think it's easily worth it though, i want people to know where something as basic and essential as water is when they see the minimap in the lobby.

I've thought about it a little bit, and here's what I've concluded.

The ingame minimap uses mini.bmp but has an algorithm to draw water on it. This works perfect when mini.bmp has no water on it, it looks just like your map. The problem arises in the lobby, where the water is not drawn on it.

Using my technique fixes the lobby, but ingame, the water is drawn on twice, hence the reason it's darker - it's just twice the ocean drawn on it. It's a pick-your-poison type situation - either no water in the lobby, or water drawn in-game a bit darker since it's drawn on twice.

BTW haha @ bruce for getting edited, I really have no idea why people act like complete asses on this forum sometimes with no provocation.

HunterW Just look at Bruces Profile and read his posts... you will understand. He just can`t ...

hunterw wrote:I've thought about it a little bit, and here's what I've concluded.

The ingame minimap uses mini.bmp but has an algorithm to draw water on it. This works perfect when mini.bmp has no water on it, it looks just like your map. The problem arises in the lobby, where the water is not drawn on it.

Using my technique fixes the lobby, but ingame, the water is drawn on twice, hence the reason it's darker - it's just twice the ocean drawn on it. It's a pick-your-poison type situation - either no water in the lobby, or water drawn in-game a bit darker since it's drawn on twice.

BTW haha @ bruce for getting edited, I really have no idea why people act like complete asses on this forum sometimes with no provocation.

Pick your poison is not a solution. A solution is to draw the cheap water texture over anything under 0 on the lobby minimap.

Work arounds are not fixes.

God wills it!

Pick your poison is not a solution. A solution is to draw the cheap water texture over anything under 0 on the lobby minimap.

That's not a solution, I just got finished explaining that the lobby minimap IS the in-game minimap, and I don't feel like explaining it again for mouth-breathers.

The only real solution would be to add the capability for the lobby client to render the water and light over the minimap, just as the ingame minimap renderer does.

Yet another solution would be to create a new referenced .bmp for the lobby minimap. This would allow people to include two versions of the minimap in their maps, one for the lobby, and one for ingame. To make this backwards compatible with older maps, you would write it in such a way that the lobby client searches first for, oh, lets say minilobby.bmp in the map, and if it can't find it, then it would just use mini.bmp (as it does now). This would probably be easier to script, but it would only work for people that take the time to create two minimaps for their maps, and wouldn't work backwards for older maps.

I don't think I've seen you do either of those yet, correct me if I'm wrong. Since you haven't, why don't you go write the couple hundred lines of code that either solution will require, and maybe then you can come shit up my thread by telling me how moronic I am for not doing that.

As it is, I have now offered two solutions, both of which involve scripting, and one workaround which does not, all of which sufficiently solve this problem. If you'd read this thread about five or six times then maybe you'd understand the problem, and understand my three ways of fixing it, and the ups and downs of all of them.

Until you can offer a better solution or workaround to this problem (notice how I've offered three, and you've offered none since you don't understand the problem), or you script one of the two solutions I've provided for the lobby client .exe, how about leaving this thread alone so that higher brain forms can come and actually comprehend the information that is inside of this thread.

Honestly... Who cares?

Whoever wants to know how the minimaps work in Spring I guess

Actually I was referring to the argument between you and bruce.

I personally wouldn't do this because of how crappy the minimap would look in game, but meh, it honestly doesn't matter either way.

Thanks hunterw, this trick is coming in handy now, really useful. and it's a small price to pay having to minimap water a bit darker.