Mini map?

WHAT WILL IT BE??? How will you view multiple planets? How will you see everything?

Maybe a minimap per planet, a little 3d sphere you can spin around. Above it would be a left and right arrow for clicking through planets in the system?

I think there probably won't be a minimap. There was a few community members who jumped on this months ago, and pestered Uber for answers on it. I don't remember any concrete answer, and so we all debated it between ourselves.

Basically, you can't have a good minimap on a spherical planet. It doesn't matter how many planets you have; you can't un-wrap a sphere in a way that's good for games.

Instead, I think you'll have to learn to love the zoom. If you want to see everything; flick the mouse wheel back and zoom out. SupCom did this amazingly well. So well that it effectively removed the minimap.

I really hope the minimap is done the same way as Forged Alliance's. You have Strategic Zoom if you like the sound of your mouse wheel clicking, and you can enable the minimap if you're more a contemporary RTS player that prefers that thing. I presume the minimap would work similarly to Sins of a Solar Empire (don't remember if it even HAD a minimap), where what you are viewing determines what the minimap displays. If you are in-atmosphere on a planet, the minimap displays the planet as a flat map. If you are in the solar system, the minimap displays a top-down view of the solar system.

Don't forget we are supposed to be able to just create floating windows that contain a view of the world - it's not too much of a stretch to assume that a 'minimap' could simply be a floating window with the planet zoomed out.

I think a transparent sphere minimap would be useful with multiple conquered planets/moons. Everytime you move to one of your planets the minimap(s) instantly change to the "inactive" planets.

I'm sure there's ways to make it work, after all minimaps are very important.

Mini maps suck.

I want Macro maps.

In my opinion, in an RTS game, mini maps are a cover up of a poor design. They show that the game was not designed well enough for the main interface to give all the information you need.

SupComm2, SoaSE, and a few other games have managed to have impeccable interface design offering everything we need on the main screen without covering up the beauty of the game with some 2D overlay garbage minimap.

Sometimes the lack of minimap in the RTS RUSE annoys me.
A minimap is a good way to maintain overview when you focus on one part of the battlefield. If the enemy attacks somewhere where you don't got your attention or tries sneak up on your forces you want to be noticed as soon as possible.

Being able to make a lot of small windows to monitor different planets will probably go a long way although a more schematic view should allow you to be noticed when enemy forces are discovered on or near an orbital body that you control and when your units takes damage for the first time on that body.

Typical states to of notice could be:
1. Uncontested. No enemy units discovered on this orbital body.
2. Contested. Enemy presence on this planet.'
3. Combat. Your units are fighting or taking damage on this orbital body.

Typically you wanna be noticed every time the state of an orbital body is aggravated. IE when an enemy is discovered on or near the orbital body or when your units are starting to take damage.
Typically the notice or planet system view can show what types of enemy units that have been spotted on the orbital body in question.

If I understood this correctly this will be moddable by custom scripts that you can enable locally to suit your personal preference.

… In that Empire, the Art of Cartography attained such Perfection that the map of a single Province occupied the entirety of a City, and the map of the Empire, the entirety of a Province. In time, those Unconscionable Maps no longer satisfied, and the Cartographers Guilds struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it. The following Generations, who were not so fond of the Study of Cartography as their Forebears had been, saw that that vast Map was Useless, and not without some Pitilessness was it, that they delivered it up to the Inclemencies of Sun and Winters. In the Deserts of the West, still today, there are Tattered Ruins of that Map, inhabited by Animals and Beggars; in all the Land there is no other Relic of the Disciplines of Geography.

— Suarez Miranda, Viajes devarones prudentes, Libro IV, Cap. XLV, Lerida, 1658

Minimaps are a sign of fundamental human limitations. It is easier to have information condensed into a small spot, where visual acuity is strongest.

Until you genetically engineer a human that has perfect peripheral vision(my science teacher bragged about this, go harvest his eyes), minimaps will always help.

I hope we can get dev clarification on this soon. The problem is not insurmountable, there were some pretty workable suggestions in the old thread. But you'd think Uber would have given some hint about their approach. If they can't settle on a way to show the whole surface of several 3d planets on one screen then Chris Taylor's prediction may come true.

If you can't have a minimap that shows everything, then how can you zoom out and see everything?

Not that it matters because you're wrong. You can unwrap a sphere, you just have to experiment to find a tradeoff between accuracy and readability. In fact, I'm pretty sure unwrapping a sphere into a minimap/strategic zoom is a make or break feature for the game.

Well there are a number of ways to project a sphere as a flat map http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Map_projection - so not impossible.

I do think a mini map is actually more important with a sphere for a battlefield as obviously you can’t see the other side of the sphere easily, you’d be forever rotating planet to see what was going on.

There will be no unwrapping of anything so you will probably be disappointed.

At any rate I belive they plan on making it so you can open multiply windows for the game, each showing a different section of the battlefeild.
Makes it easy enough to use this and the strategic zoom to make your own minimap, which show however much you want it to.

I hope this works well. That means I can have 4 planets on their own screens.

to my mind the success of a mini-map is based on the effectiveness of information reduction/concentration in relation to zoom level and view port size (selective topics, groupings, symbolization ...).

In principle, this holds for any view port and is also particular useful if you want to look at multiple "main" views with consequently lower size.
If you then want to call a mini view a mini map is up to you (and perhaps the question how and if views will be linked control-wise).

Or 4 planets per screen, making it 16 planets! That's the beauty, they've stated they want to make you able to open/split windows at will.

Thanks for the clarification. If you don't mind, how do you plan to handle strategic zoom?

I think the UI will allow for multiple windows- if nothing else to create multi-monitor support. A "minimap" is thus just a zoomed out view while you work in a more zoomed-in view.

The primary purpose of watching the minimap is to catch little features that are visible from a zoomed-out view, and that will prompt the player to jump to that location to quickly view it. It is entirely possible to capture this same functionality without necessarily mapping the planet onto a 2D minimap.

What do you think of the idea of planet overlays, such as displaying a semi-transparent planet with abstractions of units highlighted in teamcolor, both friendly units and known enemy units? Making the planet a translucent white, with units and structures standing out in very bold team color would let the player see the big picture at a glance.

The translucent view would let you see a blip indicating an enemy unit on the other side of the planet, as well as see the positions of your bases and armies, and so on. If you want to get a closer look at something you would use your main viewing window to go view that location in detail.