Ive been working on a tile engine, and Ive reached a point where the actual tile engine is practically done, except for one feature, I want it to have a minimap... I came up with a solution, but it wasn''t the most effective so I wanted to know other techniques anyone might know that are better, see, my minimap has a 1:1 scale (1 pixel == 1 tile), but this makes the minimap to be slow (even slower than the actual map drawing), of course I didnt optimize it at all since I didnt like how it looked, so I was wondering, how can I scale down the tile map so that objects arent a single pixel which makes it hard to see, like the minimap in StarCraft for example. Thanks! Luis Sempe
visual@guate.net
http://www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/6276

There''s an engine out there called "Freerage". It has a good Minimap feature.. I think there is a link on gamedev.net for it..

good luck -
Nathan s.

assuming you have your iso tiles with about a 2:1 ratio (like 64x32), you can make mini-tiles that are 4x1. i''ve experimented with it, and it looks really good.

with the same method, you can also take a 16x16 image(like a wood pattern or a stone pattern) and convert it into an outstanding iso tile.

4x2 maybe? 4x1 didn''t make much sense to me, but then again I''m known to be stupid, so i might have missed something

I guess you could generate these mini-tiles depending on the
size of the map, like if the map is small, you could
use 8x4 tiles. Just a thought, I have no clue what I''m talking about here

yea, my tiles are 64x32.. what I want to know is how do I build/draw the minimap... for example, let''s say I assign a minimap color value to every tile, then how I do I build the minimap? in other words, how do I make the mini-tiles?



Luis Sempe
visual@guate.net
http://www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/6276

I guess having super tiny tiles in videomemory would be quite fast? using them for each minimap tile..instead of acessing the surface directly and writing pixel by pixel by hand.

or you could try, drawing to an offscreen buffer (pixel per pixel) in the system memory and then blitting it to the video memory.

Edited by - Staffan on 1/31/00 11:22:30 AM

I''m still using 8bit graphics, so for my minimap, I just iterate through my map and plot a pixel for each map array element. each type of object in each map array has a tile type which is a unsigned char. I use that same number (and have chosen them for this) to match an index colour in my palette. That way I don''t have to do any if (object == resource) drawpixel(x,y, resource_color). I can just do a for() loop and do *pData = map[x][y].object_type to draw it all out. I image if i move to any other graphic format I would use the same thing, except my object type would now be a 16bit colour or a 24bit colour. I use so many #defines that I might as well do a comparison of a variable against OBJECT_TYPE_MINERAL and just make the value the #define macro''s a 16 or 24 bit colour.