My minimap mock up

To be a pedant with regards to Neutrino's post, "unwrapping" is a different topological action to "projecting", the distinction between the two being one of the main sources of contention amongst overzealous cartographers who favour one form of map over another.

Well, I read it with the added context that I know Neutrino is not a fan of minimaps in general

He may find though that something is needed in addition to the strategic view. For sheer practicality's sake. For which he has said too.

The best idea I've seen yet is to incorporate a projected map into the zoom function itself. Namely, you zoom out, and the planet flattens itself out, centered on your current position.

It's the simplest, most elegant solution I've seen yet, and it solves many issues at once.

- Zoom out / in in one move to move from one side of the planet to the other
- Immediately see the position of the enemy relative to your own forces
- no need to look at another window to view critical data
- the edge of the flattened map (where distortion is greatest) is easily understood to be the edge, and is controlled by the player by simply zooming around.
- easily orient the player by giving the flattened map a consistent orientation

Yeah, you guys are starting to sway Uber's opinion with the plethora of "WTB Minimap" threads. I won't say it's a bad thing, but it's not a good thing.

And I agree with everything Raevn posted, a minimap, just like a grid, would not be worth the time and effort put into developing it. Only a few trained individuals would be able to use it due to how confusing it would be. Sound cues and alerts would work SO much better.

Anyways, the point at which you'll need a minimap is when you're fighting on multiple celestial bodies, not one. Remember that at most, two players (should be) spawning on the same planet in the future. I could totally see a minimap where it's just a star system with alerts over planets, ala this image.

You appear to have created what looks like a Dwarf Fortress rendition of Planetary Annihilation.

I do not know whether this concept fills me with delight or terror.

I think I need to go and lie down for a bit.

I will describe an alternative idea to the minimap.
i m not saying it is the final ultimate system. it is just something different which can help to stand back on the issue.

Automated survey zone
Survey zone are circles of the size you want. They allow the player to move quickly from point to point and know what is happening at the other side of the universe in real time (awesome).

Create a survey zone
For example press and hold "S", click and hold "left click" to define the center of the circle, drag to define the diameter, release "mouse1" then "S".





You just create a survey zone, and a new icone appears into you GUI.

Icone of survey zone
If you left click on the icon your view point is center to the survey zone.
if you right click on the icon you have a contextual menu.



open a window
it opens a new window showing you what is happening there.

Rename
if you want something more precise than "survey1"

Warning rules
The survey icon can blink in red in order to warn you. The warning rules are "enemy in the zone", or "friendly unit in the zone are attacked", or what ever you want.

Delete
To delete the survey zone.


note that it could be extend to unit group and commander

This is awesome. That sounds like it could be made really intuitive.

My one concern - as your base expands, will you have to manually edit all the survey zones? That could be quite time-consuming if you have a fair few to monitor. Perhaps some sort of smart boundaries?

Also, what happens if you have a 'units in the area' alert and you get orbital bombardment occurring?

I like the look of the minimap idea in the OP.

+1 to satanpetitcul's idea. That could be really cool, if a bit expensive to render.

I think binding camera locations/orientations to F1-F10 would serve the same purpose but without using a gui or requiring any click-dragging. add a modifier key like alt shift or ctrl to bind multiple cameras per planet and to open a location in a new window. A gui may be useful to new players but it would be worse than just zooming in and out.

I like the idea in the OP. It may make most sense to have it linked to the reverse of the planet by default, so when you turn the main planet, the map rotates in such a way as to show you what is on the other side.

It would be good to be able to unlink them and move them independently, but I think that having them inversely-linked would be a good default mode.

I'm going to touch on a number of elements of this topic (some of which has been talked about before in other threads).

Mercator is awesome in that it maps a sphere to a square ... but it also does so by clipping off some area around the north and south pole. Several other projection methods do this as well which that makes them unsuitable in their unmodified form for use as a minimap for a game like ours.


The wireframe sphere as a minimap is certainly a common idea, and it works well with a limited number of points of interest. Technically several space sim style games have used concepts similar to this to handle their radar, though it's frequently visualized as a flat perspective plane in the orientation of your view with above / below markers. They look really cool, but they very quickly become unusable. I have serious doubts with "just show icons on the backside of the planet" being actually useful. I actually already tried something like this by having strategic icons always render and just change their opacity / color when on the backside. The result was less than pleasant. Strat icons on the front of the planet covered up important information on the back of the planet and in medium density the two just blend together to an unsortable mess.

It does have the benefit of being easy to understand how a point on the minimap correlates to a point on the planet. A bonus is if the minimap is oriented to match the relative location and orientation of the camera it would help people keep their bearings on their location on the planet.

The wing commander style radar, which is a variation on Lambert Azimuthal style projections are a bit better in regard to keeping important data grouped, but as they don't do a good job of giving any sense of relative location.



On "Automated survey zones"... the setup you describe doesn't seem particularly automated. However if you look at the original kickstarter video you can see we had some similar ideas. It's not something we've spent any time on yet, but it will be significantly more important once multiple planets comes into play. And yes, in a way the minimap concept is somewhat irrelevant if all you're concerned with is the issue of player messaging. It does not help with relative location awareness, so the two areas are not mutually exclusive. Most likely we'll be having a combination of several different things.



Also, a bit of hidden functionality that already exists in the game:
Shift + Number = save camera position.
Alt + Number = move camera to saved position.

I still don't understand why there is such a focus on a mini-map.. when there is a GIANT BIG MAP right in front of you that you play on.

I mean it's THE best feature of Supreme Commander.. why are we even considering moving back to mini maps?

Imagine being able to smoothly transition between planetary (spherical) view and strategic projection view with a simple scroll of the mouse. One scroll to zoom out... suddenly you've got an overview of the entire planet.. one scroll to zoom in, and you're on the opposite side of the planet, managing a battle there.

http://footage.shutterstock.com/clip-55 ... earth.html <-- This
is what I mean by flatten into a strategic view btw.

Yes map projections cut things off at the edges, but I'm not sure why it's considered to be an issue when the view of the SPHERICAL PLANET cuts off like 60% of the map! A flattened projection of the planet as a full screen strategic view gives you a good view of 99% of the planet's surface.

I dunno, maybe it's just too much technical effort at this point. But it's already hard enough to manage a (small) planetary battle right now, I hate to think of doing it across more than one planet. I already spend a huge amount of time simply scrolling around the planet. It's purely wasted effort.. imagine playing supcom with a 'strategic' zoom locked to seeing only 25% of the map when you zoomed out.. and the 'answer' is to give you the ability to jump to saved camera positions??

Supcom had a minimap, and apparently people used it poor guys, otherwise there wouldn't be so much debate over this.

The mockup in the OP is gonna be totally unusable once you get more than 10 radar contacts on it.

What might work is having a mini planet in the corner always showing the reverse side of the planet you're looking at?

Also, I'd like to try playing PA with the ability to make multiple windows before I say a mini map is necessary.

I agree that style of minimap looks really good

Don't forget that any spherical representation distorts the views along the curvature of the planet.

In order to have a proper 'minimap' you need several windows of several different angles of the planet.. which is yet another reason why it's a terrible idea.

Whenever you have enemy contact, put a flare similar in style to the starting area selection flare. To prevent flooding, either move the flare if the contact position changes within a certain area or just leave it there as a general reference point. When the contact is lost fade the flare after some delay. One could also put some context info and function on a flare. For instance If you click the flare it jumps back in the chronocom when the contact happened.

Also I would prefer to have an option to place these kind of flares myself as we'll to mark relevant locations. Have the GUI support flare screen snap movement, like having a list of all flares and being able to click on it to instantly move the camera.

With the flares I would be able to not get lost on multiple fronts, the general and relative location is easy to see when zooming out. Allow for different colored flares as well to indicate different things.

I dont think you really need a minimap, in early game 70% won't be covered by intel and will be useless. Rather identify why exactly you want a minimap as in what functionality do you really want and try to find a smarter solution.

I'd rather have multiple windows with views of certain places on the planet(s). A minimap is poopy.