
Not necessarily 3D rotation, 2D would be more than fine.
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Rotating camera could automatically adjust a 2D minimap too. Easier/more intuitive orientation.Argh wrote:Other than looking cool, what advantages would there be?
kCarRepairer wrote:Good idea. Here: http://springrts.com/phpbb/viewtopic.ph ... 15#p331315
Thank you for your valuable insights and experience. I appreciate your contribution. Your unique perspective and ideas gave me a whole new look at the issue. Again, thanks!!!Argh wrote:Well, try writing that Widget. Should be fairly easy:
1. Quad, with minimap texture on it.
2. Point objects in a display list. Update display list based on X,Z positions of all visible Units (another good use for that speedup I described, btw).
3. Perform gl.Rotate to the required vector, which would be the same as the camera's vector (IIRC).
Again, this only starts to get complicated when you factor in unit icons, explosions, etc. Probably the current Minimap could use rotate, but it would require a fairly major change to the stock UI, unless it just follows the camera angle (in which case, I predict howling from OTA players who never use the different POVs, because the minimap would change).
But I'm still not sold on why this is supposedly an improvement of the UI. To be perfectly clear, I can see advantages to rotating it in 2D, so that the y of the minimap and the Y of the camera are the same, but the x-angled POV just seems like it would make specific unit selection, etc. really annoying.
2D, for the third time.Argh wrote:<shrugs> I don't mind getting flamed, but it's clear that we have a misunderstanding here.
Basically, this is a non-trivial request, unless people do it the sloppy way (i.e., just capture the current Minimap to a texture and render it on a rotated quad, which would look pretty bad).
On the other hand, doing a simple dots-only version in Lua is not hard, and would allow us to evaluate it and think about the final feature set.
For example, if the POV is 3D, then do we start showing 3D paths for weapons, or do we keep it linear? If we keep it linear, then how are we supposed to prevent the motion of all the dots for projectiles from confusing end-users about what they're seeing? Seems like we could end up spending a huge amount of CPU time on this, if we make it really fancy, for very little benefit for end-users, unless it's planned well, yet the addition of a 3D rotation means that some thought needs to be put into how to avoid user confusion.
Which is why I'd like to see a tech demo, or at least some more detailed discussion, before supporting this. It's not that I think this is an awful idea, it just requires some thought.
Argh wrote:That is not 2D.
It was the first pretty rotated minimap I found on google images. Try reading.Regret wrote:Not necessarily 3D rotation, 2D would be more than fine.
What are you talking about? What on earth would you need that for?Argh wrote:However, that brings up another issue, which is that, IIRC, there are no ways to search an arbitrary rectangle for UnitIDs.