Pings and Minimaps

Okay so in my mod I'm using the minimap as a radar by pinging the location of the enimies relative to the player. The probem with this is the white box of where your camera is located. Easily removed, use an empty text file instead of an actual BLP. However, since the file is 'corrupt' it seems you cannot ping on it.

Is there a better way to remove the white camera box from the minimap?

EDIT: Hah; after posting I realized I posted in Triggers not General. Oh well, too bad theres no admin features to move threads at the momment.

Indeed. But it's not that off.

So, by 'corrupting' the camera bounds texture (which I'm assuming is just a white square), you disabled the ability to add minimap pings? I don't know much about this, so I'll just speculate a bit here if you don't mind. Perhaps the camera bound box and the ping use the same texture, causing the ping to be just as invisible as the box? If not, then perhaps you can get it to work by importing a transparent texture for the camera box instead of a 'corrupt' one (assuming the game would treat the alpha channel as transparency).

I guess you could alternatively make the radar with dummy units instead of pings, but that would be a pain to make it work in multiplayer: to avoid each player seeing everybody's radar, you would have to make all radar dummy units invisible, and then move along them additional detector dummies to reveal them to the player on who's radar they're supposed to show... The ping idea sounds really a lot better than this.

Sorry I was not clear enough:

There is no texture for the camera bounding box; at least none I can find. What I used a corrupt file for was the wc3mapMap.blp file because when a corrupt file is used, Wacraft cannot add or change anything on the minimap (Camera Bounds Box, and pings it would seem.) If you use an alpha minimap the box still remains.

Perhaps there is a texture for the camera bounds that I have yet to find (It might be TGA and therefore in the WinMPQ and not in Wc3view). If you know of it that would solve the problem.

EDIT: Another posibility might be a modified SLK or a simlar type file; however I know nothing in that department really.

I don't know anything regarding this, I was merely speculating... The topic is interesting for me because I have been considering other uses for the minimap besides it's default (that's where the idea of showing things on the minimap with units comes from, I never thought about pings, unfortunately I never considered the problem of the camera box either, so I don't have any ideas for that), but I haven't actually got to research and test much, so when trying to help you I'm remaining at speculation.

I dont think there's a texture for the white square. Squares are very easy to just program into the game, why would you need a texture for it :)
However, since this is probably for your fps, I suggest trying to fix it with camera bounds. if you set camera bounds to a point (must use some jass for that maybe) the white square will probably be so big you wont see it on the minimap.
Gl :)

I don't know... when making a game, my cousin figured out that with hardware accelerated graphics, the fastest way to do anything is with triangles; even a simple thing as a line is drawn faster if you make it a 3D rectangle. So, unless you know for sure it isn't, chances are the camera box is a model with a texture... but I'm just speculating again.

i think that by modifying the interface files u can just remove the portion that defines the white square, i know people have been doing it with World of Warcraft to make interface mods and such.

@shadow1500: Yeah, but what interface files? Its not as easy to modify as WoW and I see no SLKs for that.

@Anitarf: I thought maybe it was a model but I still see no model that could be used for that (Or if there is one, it cannot be modified by simply replacing it; such as the model used to create the location of units/heros on the minimap.)

@Toot: Thought about that, I'll give it a try in a few hours.

Open up miscdata.txt, u will see this there:

[Minimap]
MinimapColorBorder=255,60,60,70

could be what you want aye?

Good idea; however importing that .txt does not seem to have any effect (I tried changing the color for Critical Strike to the same as Mana Burn and it remained red.)

EDIT: Toot has informed me via MSN that the text file infact does not contain the value I am looking for. As such I attempted to push the box off the edge of the minimap. However the result is not what I hope for. Below you can see the result:



As you can see, the bounds line is pushed off into one corner, rather than all the way off the edges. Also, if the camera is turned, sometimes (although only for a short momment) the square is morphed into a rectangle. Also note the grey lines (Shown inside the red squares).

Is there a better way to do this?


Yes, it leaks, but thats not the point. How can I do this so that it pushes the whote box all the way off the minimap, or at least, along each edge evenly.

Hows about a bump? Yes that will do nicely. Bump.

Heh, i've pondered over the minimap radar for a while.

i've never seen a solution to the lines though, other than what you have there.

Maybe try making the borders an infinitesimal square in the middle of the screen. Try using that trigger to make a massive region, and use that. It would create a dot or at least a small square. It could possibly crash though being outside of the map.

I don't know which is drawn last, the minimap preview or the user interface. Maybe you could get a custom interface to cover up the edges of the minimap, thus hiding the camera box when using iNfraNe's (toot's) method. That's, of course, under the assumption that user interface can cover the minimap (and, more importantly, the camera box), and it still leaves you with the problem of the box occasionaly shrinking when the camera turns.

I know from experience that the minimap is drawn after the interface, and as such cannot be covered up like that.

@Gandalf2349: Already tried that, it just makes a 4cm x 4cm square in the middle of the screen. Only way to resolve that would be to make the map boundaries gigantic; and even then a 1cm box would be there.

Well, i'd say you have 2 options here. You can either go with what you had before, with the attempt to move it off the edges.

Or you can go with the 4cm^2 box in the center. Pull an 'I meant to do that' and just call it part of the design.

See if you can keep it as a constant square, and not moving around.

Also, one other thing for your consideration. I feel where you're coming from. I'm a perfectionist like that, where it just makes me shudder to have that square suddenly morph on you when you turn, because it's not what it's supposed to do, but you know what? B.Net isn't very critical on programming technique you use. They'll probably just accept it. If you can't get it perfect then there's no standard for you to meet. They mostly won't care. If it's impossible to do it than that's fine, just have it as one of those 2 options. I'd suggest a 4x4 square, because of it's massive scaled down size it will have less of a margin of error pixel for pixel, and that it won't disturb the camera of the player.

-Gandalf2349

P.S. Also, just curious, are you modifying the Ping textures at all, you could get a nice little plain blip if you did that.