[REL] Alerts Minimap

You don't need to create the avatar yourself actually, unless the map creation fails.
Creating an avatar with cheats enabled is as easy as pressing alt+f1 and then ctrl+v if you have the default settings.
Well I guess I may do some more stuff on this very soon to make it easier. Though you still will need to use the UI debugger and edit a javascript file.

added tutorial video of how too make mappings. Notice I pushed an update of the GeoMapper mods to github, so get the newest version of them.

It does not show the Minimap anymore.
Not even for the Exodus Systems.
I tried reinstalling, but it still does not work for me.
I must have done something wrong.
Do you know, how to fix it ?
EDIT:
Fixed; somehow

You most likely broke the system.js file by entering invalid javascript.
Though a reinstall should fix that, as it deletes your own mappings.
In the debugger console LIVE_GAME you should see red stuff if that is the case. That red stuff is helpful.

I cant use Ingame Chat anymore (I cant close it and have to F5)

sounds like you broke stuff. No idea what is going on without debugger info.
Most likely a wrong ; or the like somewhere.

I disabled all Mods, it does still not work.

No idea what you are doing tbh.

I found water. Never would've noticed that without the minimap.

Also I am experiementing with higher density of test location. It looks my new mapping concept can go down quite into the detail, but I may need to fix the size of mex and other markers and make only the land dots very small:

Mapping at this density does take quite a bit longer though, for obvious reasons: this screen has 4x as many locations as the other ones. Now trying 13.34 times, just to check how it looks like

Give us as much Detail as possible.
If I have to let my computer calculate for the entire night, good maps are worth it.

mex are invisible, but it is indeed very detailed



hacked a few lines of code to have a bigger view of this, 600x600 isn't reasonable for actually playing, but it shows nicely just how fine the mapping can get:

No Robinson projection?

It's not among the projections currently in the mod, no. But adding it is as simple as adding a few lines of extra code. Basically for every projects I want to support I need a few lines of code and there are a lot available in d3, so I was lazy and did not all of them. Many look very similar anyway:
https://github.com/d3/d3-geo-projection/
Robinson is among them: http://bl.ocks.org/mbostock/3710566
just not in the code of the mod right now

The supported projects are listed code wise here:
https://github.com/pamods/Minimap/blob/master/Minimap/ui/mods/minimap/projections.js

The robinson example from d3 has the code I would need to add there to make it work in the mod.

Many of the options are essentially useless for a game like this, like berghaus or the various polyhedron models. Many are north pole / northern hemisphere centric as well due to most of the models being made by people who live in that hemisphere. It's great for rendering the actual earth, but kind of terrible for a game like ours where there's a good chance bases will be on poles and lots of stuff happening on the equator. It's a hard problem.

Robinson I think is the easiest to read, doing a good job of balancing legibility and real distances, but obviously makes the poles difficult.
The various dual lobe shapes like august and van der grinten 4 do a decent job of handling the poles, and are still decently legible compared to robinson.

Yeah I know some of them are pretty likely to be funny but pointless. I just added a bunch of random ones, a few that looked good and a few more basically.
From playing around the ones that most often worked out for me I think are:

Lambert Azimuthal Equal-Area
Van der Grinten I
Azimuthal Equidistant
and those screens above are Ginzburg IX which also feels good.

Basically I configure a projection per planet, using whatever looks best on that planet, also rotating the minimap in a way that makes the edges be "hopefully not so important" areas, like lava, if possible.

From actually playing with them I've come to the conclusion that a projected minimap like this definitely is not as easy to use as a minimap on a flat map like in sc2. But that's mostly a temporary issue. So if a player plays a completely new map it is an issue that slows down learning the map a bit. Just like it is harder to learn the setup of a 3D sphere map even without minimap as you need to think in "randomly" rotating sphere.

But I think the issues are not as bad as one may think at first. The thing is: Players learn the map. And they learn the minimap. They learn what location on the minimap is what location on the real planet. Once there is such a mapping in the head of a player the distortion matters very little. A dot that blinks in a certain loction basically triggers a feeling of "ah there is something on that location of the planet". Since the mapping between minimap and planet is static it can be learned and using some visual cues, as the mex or the fine details on the super fine mapped images above it isn't even that hard.
So basically even a weird butterfly shaped projection is much better than nothing once the player has a mapping of minimap-locations > planet-location in their head.

What helps me a lot to learn the mapping more quickly is the pip that shows when moving the mouse on the minimap, so I can quickly go over what location on the minimap represents what location on the planet.

Thank the grid cells in your hippocampus

http://www.nature.com/news/nobel-prize-for-decoding-brain-s-sense-of-place-1.16093

v2 of alerts minimap brings default support for the new ranked maps from the new PTE

It was also one of my suggestions. Very good point looking at projections having a focus on displaying the whole earth including the poles. The Robinson projection was also used many years by National Geographic for their world maps. But it got dismissed a few years ago by an even better suited projection called Winkel III or Winkel Tripel (See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winkel_tripel_projection). Would be great having this one in the mod, too.

In the end one of the main problem is that some of the planets have just too less terrain features. For sure it's easy to recognize planet earth, it's possible to orient oneself on PA planets with several lakes or lava basins, maybe it's even possible to recognize some big vaults or mountains, but on flat moons it's really hard to keep track where you are.
My idea would be to emphasize the grid system (it could help a bit in estimating distances) and to play with pole lock while having the mini-map. Another suggestion is having a reference frame on the map, indicating the current viewpoint (Like for example in Google Earth).




Ps. Cola, I'm totally impressed how you came up with the idea mapping the planets with walls and torpedo turrets. That's f* amazing.

The next version of alerts minimap will offer robinson and winkel tripel.

I thought of such a "you are looking here" marker as well, but I don't think there is any way to get the current camera position without reading the pa process memory. Though actually I guess it should not be hard to find the camera position in the process memory, as we can set it to values easily already. But that would require an extra program, I doubt there is a javascript API to read process memory ^^

A grid overlay on the planet that is also visible on the minimap might help as well, but ofc would impede the visuals with the grid.
I think it may also help if I could color the minimap to show ice, desert, etc. But I have no idea how to get that information. Maybe it is possible to modify the biomes definition and structure definitions so that i.e. walls can only be build on destert and pgens only on ice, etc.

Personally I really don't like pole lock, I used it at first but quickly stopped, because it makes playing on the poles horrible.
But the orientation of the camera and the minimap is indeed a problem, having "up" on the minimap by "right down" on the 3D view is weird. Maybe an indicator of the current planet rotation next to the minimap would help.
I thought of enabling pole lock on the pip that shows when moving the camera though. No idea if I can do that though.

relased an update, updated main post.
Changes:

- preview pip has a polelock now
- you can configure the size of the dots by type now. Helpful to have finer terrain dots
- The mapping mods have been updated with a finer mapping (2250 tests per km^2 instead of 750) resolution. Additionally I tweaked the numeric precision for storage to save space and increased the placement size of the test building to make it detect finer cliffs in the terrain.
- Allow for easy configuration of minimap sizes per planet
- Added Winkel Tripel and Robinson projections. Winkel Tripel is now the default projection.

All in all this results in a much better minimap quality and a much easier to track relation between mouse movement on the minimap and the preview pip.



EDIT:
small update with a bugfix for a bug nobody noticed in 30 minutes and:
- left clicking the minimap aligns the main view to the poles now in addition to moving the camera to the location. This way, on a normally N up, S down orientated minimap you will get the exact view from the preview pip to the main view. No more weird orientations.