Is it possible to have a mini-map on screen with good guys in green and bad guys in red, showing the level progression? In a perfect world, it could be opened up to a full screen map showing where you have, and have not, been - like unlocking areas.

Is any of this possible now? A store item perhaps? Built in? Or am I SOL?

Mike

It is possible but a lot of hard work and scripting.

Here is one I did last year.

That looks very similar to the kinds of mini-maps I made in Blitz 3D or Dark basic Pro - pretty much flipping a camera so that it looks directly down and then track the player.

How would I do that in Game Guru? I could likely do it easier in AGK2 if it has the 3D camera commands.

How would I show the baddies and good guys?

Mike

Nope, I made a few thousand small sprites by placing the camera way up in the sky looking down and using a screen capture tool. Then I wrote a script which displays the sprite tiles in the little window, the tiles are slightly smaller than the edge thickness so that covers up the new tiles appearing and the 'stale' ones disappearing.

The enemies show up on the map as small coloured dots, the colour indicates the 'state' they are in, i.e. green for idle, red for alerted.

The tricky part of the scripting was scaling and positioning all the sprites so that it works in any screen mode, never did get that perfectly right but if I did it again I would probably redesign that bit as I've learned a hell of a lot of new tricks since then.

Actually making the tiles is time consuming as they all have to be cropped correctly so they line up edge to edge properly.

This one works in a completely different way:

Check out the smallg thread, he's got a script for a mini map with real time updates and enemy player markers
https://forum.game-guru.com/thread/207801?page=11#msg2535525

@AmenMoses this looks like an improvement on the old terrain map!?

is this as insane as it sounds? Where these a 'few thousand' manual screenshots?? lol madness

@Freakon, actually the terrain map came after as that only became possible when Lee added the terrain height command. Yes, madness is a good term, I had to press a key for each screenshot but the camera positioning was automated. The post processing of the screenshots to create the tiles was mostly automated as well, did that part on my Macbook!

Yeah, lol. If only it was as easy as setting a second camera looking down I did an overhead map for this little unfinished project. All the islands and such are separate sprites I had to grab in editor one at a time.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-rf-QfKQIXI&t=164s


For some reason can't embed as normal, so just put a basic link for now.

That is pretty cool.
Your right, the link dont want to add proper for the video.

Yeah, awesome stuff DVader

Reliquia....

One day perhaps an easy GameGuru feature... that's my dream.

It can never be 'easy' in the sense of just drop it in and it works, the look of the map has to complement the game, i.e. it would be no good having a top down fully lit map for a zombie fest or a high res detailed 'modern' map for a fantasy style game. In addition only the game maker knows what they want to appear on the map.

For example for the scrolling map I did for the Big Escape level I made a copy of the map and deleted all the trees and bushes and 'moveable' items like barrels and boxes, I also deleted all the enemies and 'temporary' items like tents and road blocks.

Next I wrote a Lua script that put the camera at specific coordinates 10,000 units in the sky and each time a button is pressed moved along a set number of units in x, at the end of the 'row' it moves back to the origin x and down a specific number of units in z. I use a screen capture tool which names the files it creates and pressed the capture button for each screen.

I ended up with several thousand individual screens for the BE level and it isn't really that big of a level!

Finally I put all the screen captures through gimp in batch mode (on my Mac) and cropped each one to just the middle 64x64 pixels portion, each of these are a single tile which is then loaded as sprites into GG for display in the scrolling map.

It is possible I suppose for Lee to have GG do that automatically, but it would only work for a specific style of map and you would still need to display the tiles somehow, either as I did with a Lua script or again have Lee write a specific engine addition to do it. (a simple way of doing it in engine would be to render the scene from above including only static entities but then it would not be a true 'map' as it would contain trees and bushes and grass which you would not expect to see on a 'map')

I think basically people have to accept that some elements of a game, especially the 'polish' that makes a really good game, are always going to involve a lot of work!

I agree

I do think of course that the ability to use a downward facing camera would be fine for most people It could be considered a live satellite view so seeing trees and all would be fine ;p A way to grab a screenshot of the entire map would also be useful as well to avoid grabbing all those closer shots. For a map that would probably be more than detailed enough. You could then either use as is or start changing it as you wish.

The problem with a simple top down view is that by default a single camera position would have perspective issues, even from 10,000 units high I found that only a small part in the middle of the image was truly 'top-down', towards the edges you see the sides of buildings. Also you have to either be high enough to not get shadows or find some way of turning them off. (that's before you have all the other issues that lighting effects give you, and fog for that matter)

To get a truly 'flat' image (like a satellite gives you) you would have to have the camera a huge distance away.

Satellites don't give flat images, they still have perspective same as any other camera, obscured from it's height but still readily apparent. It doesn't even have to be a satellite, that was purely an example, could as easily be a drone these days. Still, were talking about a game of some sort here and reality does not always apply. I don't really think game players would take that much interest in the map system itself, beyond using it to navigate around.

It all depends on the person making the game and how they want it to look at the end of the day. As you say polish is one of the things that always takes time.

Personally, I would just go with a top-down camera for position and make dummy objects that are attached to the main character and bad guys and show up as green and red dots. The whole thing would be scaled way down and fit into a frame of some kind.

That's how I would do it. That's how I actually did do it in a few Blitz 3D and Dark Basic Pro games I was working on but never completed.

Story of my life!

Mike

Very cool but sounds like a lot of work. Multiple camera control commands would certainly help here.