MiniMap question

I know that @ben said that they are not planning on going over a minimap section with the upcoming RPG course. I was really thinking about it tonight and wanted a bit of input. Wouldn’t a basic minimap be similar to our overhead camera used in the bowling lectures? Obviously you could make some tweaks to it through script. Things such as following the player, showing dots instead of enemies (Could be done through tags), showing a small arrow instead of the player themselves (again, using tags). I know there is a lot more involved, but honestly, could this be a solution to a basic minimap? Input is very welcome.

honestly, i think it would depend on how they structure the game, it can be extremly difficult to make, depending on how they make the game.
but yeah, the core principle is rather simple.

It looks like you suggestion as a starting place is pretty much on the money @EricPhillips. Here’s a quick tutorial I spotted online which pops a camera above the player’s head, uses layers too.

This one is a little sneaky in that it shows a very nice looking picture of a minimap, but the tutorial itself doesn’t cover all of that, but for player movement it’s a good starting place and pretty quick.

If you were in a dungeon or in fact inside any building/cave I suspect you would need to add a little more cleverness to display things like the walls and so on.

I like that tutorial. Very similar to what I was thinking. The spheres are an interesting touch I didn’t think about lol

The main problem if you add a camera for that is the performance, it is a pretty heavy thing (just check in the profiler from the bowling class and you will see). I would add a 2d map (could even be an baked one from the game world), some dots representing the player and enemies and then Id compare the player position in the world to the pin in the minimap

I was initially thinking the same thing about the second camera as i assumed it would also be displaying everything. I guess this is where the layers come in useful to turn things on and off.

The method you describe Johnny is what I initially was thinking before doing a quick Google earlier, plot the co-ords for the player on a small image.

This has to be one where comparing the differences would be essential, but the ease of using the camera and having everything where it should be for you already and just turning a few things off seems like a really good win - if its efficient.

@Eric yeah I loved the spheres idea too, I started thinking of complex ways to achieve the same thing and was then like, erm, oh… that’s a bit, erm, easy… hehe…

I guess you could use layers for cavern ceilings also, turn them off for the main camera but on for the minimap so that you dont see “inside” of the rocks which are supposed to be solid. Not sure about multi-level buildings with floor plans though.

Clearly needs some experimentation :slight_smile:

Another tutorial I watched a few minutes of suggested not adding the camera to the player but having it as a separate object, and then using the players position to update the cameras position with code - seemed like a sensible idea.

Definitely one for the performance tests this I think to find an easy, managable solution which is good for performance also.

Maybe using cullingMask, with a specific layerMask assigned to every object of a specific floor, and set the minimap camera’s cullingMask at every floor change to just render the floor in which the player is.

Just off the top of my head as an idea, nothing fancy.

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Could be fun to experiment with :slight_smile:

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Thinking about it, it may be useful too for the outdoors, in order to let the camera skip a lot of rendering of objects which are anyway not visible/useful in a minimap.

The drawback is the time needed to give all the game objects a specific layerMask, but hey, in programming there’s always some mindless grinding involved. :smiley:

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I’m gonna play with the idea too. Anyone who comes up with a simple (or decently simple) way of putting in a minimap should post it in the RPG course as a contribution. I think anything that is contributed will be a big help

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Hi! I used Pro Radar Builder in Unity that can create

  • 2D & 3D radars and tracking systems.

  • Static minimaps , ideal for small static scenes.

  • Realtime Minimap , ideal for large scenes / Open worlds.

  • Advanced rotation re-targeting.

and also offers lots free template to beautify your radars.
The System Uses Neither Unity UI nor IMGU, making it fast and no coding is needed . It’s awesome.

Also the UI Target Tracker is the free trial version of the radar builder. you should try!!

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