My minimap mock up

I can only speak from a Sc2 perspective, but minimaps can be very important. In Sc2, literally 80% of the time you should be looking at the minimap. Here is a heatmap of a pro player's eye gaze tracked via the use of mirametrix.

http://i.imgur.com/NS9R9.png

As you can see, a very significant amount of time is spent looking at the minimap. The reason the best players look at the minimap so much is because it just isn't practical to pan your camera around the map to look for all of the things you need to be looking for.

If the minimap didn't exist in Sc2, a lot of luck would be involved because you could miss important events just because your camera was somewhere else. This can't be fixed with alerts given to the player because some events don't give off alerts and shouldn't. Events like seeing a probe skirt around the fog of war in your base or drop ships flying by a watch tower towards your natural. Not seeing those can be fatal. That's the what the minimap is for. Sure, the game could have excluded a minimap but then the game would be balanced around giving the player less information and drop ship play would need to be nerfed and air units would probably be gone or behave very differently. Basically, excluding a minimap will force designers to avoid high risk high reward tactics which are often times very fun to watch.

For a game like PA it may be good enough to just give us a bunch of windows we can control. If minimaps aren't included with the game then every game I play I will create two small windows for every planet, one for each side, and that will serve as a minimap. Yeah there will be some distortion around the edges but I can deal with that.

Once I get to 10 planets the screen will get crowded. I have enough monitors to support a lot of windows, but wouldn't that give me an unfair advantage? Maybe this could be alleviated by having the option for each window to hide unless a specific planet is in focus.

Also, what if a player could ctrl+click on a window to move the main window camera to that location? That would be the final piece needed to cobble together a makeshift minimap.

Given enough flexibility, players could solve the minimap problem themselves.

I'm a bit concerned about all the 'viewports' idea. Even the Supreme Commander minimap is too small to be very useful on 81x81 maps. So those viewports would need to be a bit larger. But with ten planets, I'd need twenty. And my monitor definitely isn't large enough for that (1280 x 1024)...

If there was an option to hide views depending on what the main view is focused on, that could help a little when combined with camera location hotkeys. So you could set 2 views to be visible for each planet and you could switch between planets rapidly with camera hotkeys or the "," key to see what's going on in the galaxy. Only two views for each planet would be visible at any time.

Maybe you could set up 1 window for every planet when focused on your most secured planet, because you won't need the screen space as much on a planet that isn't at risk. That planet would be like the "info hub" where you can easily see whats going on on every planet at the same time.

Strategic zoom & having radar contacts shown in-game mostly nullifies this argument, although curved planets hiding the other side does lend it back some weight (this wouldn't apply in Supreme Commander, for example - a minimap simply wasn't necessary in that game).

you don't have the advantage of being able to see the whole map after zooming out anymore like in SupCom. The minimap was invented to prevent constant scrolling in RTS games and to instantly relocate the camera. Now we have the problem of constant scrolling and the inability to relocate the camera. Doesn't take a genius to see a solution is needed.

This is exactly why I fail to see why there would be an issue with zooming out to a flat representation of the planet. You'd be able to see the whole map, never have to scroll, and instantly be able to relocate the camera.

Problem solved. Strategic zoom restored to its full usefulness. Leave the multiple windows for managing more than one planet.

If we were to play on cubes instead of spheres, that solution would be perfect. But we play on spheres. I can imagine that such a zoom out to projection will:

a) look weird
b) hard to understand for the untrained player due to distortions,

how is this representative of anything? what about the many moons and other planets you have troops on? zooming out to the galactic view IS your minimap.

Tell us how a solar system view that shows everything that happens on multiple spheres can work without horribly distortions. That is a problem we are all trying to solve.
"Just zoom out" is just not enough to get an overview of multiple spheres.

Alerts alerts alerts! They are the best solution in this particular case.

If you like to drown in alerts, yes. If you want to get an overview of the game, no.

EDIT: What is wrong about the quote?!

A spherical representation BY DEFAULT hides 50% of the map, and 'distorts' the edges of another 10-20% of the view due to the curvature.

And yet this is somehow a better solution than a flat projection map that shows the entire surface?

If the projection map is centered on where you were last looking, and there is a smooth unfolding animation between the flat projection and the spherical world, the player will ALWAYS know where he is.. and better yet, he would be in full control of exactly where any distortion in the map would be.

I have yet to see ANY spherical representation that gets even close to giving the player that kind of strategic overview, apart from some kind of solution that has 4+ windows per planet up at the same time - which Neutrino already indicated is going to be a hefty performance hit.


Alerts are friggin retarded btw. Either you filter them so much they become useless, or you get so many alerts it just becomes noise.

Seems like to me if you just zoomed out and the planet flatted what the hell was the point of having a spherical planet in the first place. Might as well just make it flat all the time.

uhh.. lets see, first off, because it's a PLANET. No edges. Spherical. Bonk them into each other.. how does seeing a different view of the planet somehow take that away? You could just as easily say "what's the point of having a spherical planet if you show both sides of the planet at once.. may as well just make it half-spheres all the time..

Obviously, just like any other 'for awesome screenshots' feature, you could hold down a key and zoom out without the flattening. Space + scroll... whatever.

I think this was my point to begin with...

I don't know why there is a need for a mini-map at all. I'm sure there are much better ways to represent information, like the devs said. Also If you zoomed out and the planet flattened how would the solar system look when it's just a bunch of flat planes spinning around each other. Probably horrible.

No hard edges on a sphere.

That means there's no natural walls to hide up against.

Yeah you have to keep in mind that currently there in only 1 planet it's moon and the sun. Not much to zoom out to. Though when the game is released zooming out will display many planets.

If you zoomed out and wanted to see the solar system, you'd have two choices - view the solar system as it is (spheres).. or view the strategic map, which would give you (probably) a series of smaller windows, one for each planet, with a flat representation of the entire planet, so that you could see what's going on in ALL your planets, on ALL sides of the planets, all in one go.

Making it zoom out to flat by default doesn't mean you can't hold down a key and zoom out to get the spherical view.. just that the flat view is more useful while playing, so it should be default.

How about a camera that is always on the opposite side of the planet where you are looking?

That's what I'm hanging out for.

That said, I don't know the heck it'd do when zoomed out to the see the entire solar system.