An overhead minimap
Add an overhead minimap functionality. This should work just like most minimaps in most other games: it should show the surrounding terrain and larger structures, together with helpful markers for different objects of interest.
The map texture can easily be gotten from the terrain system, either by fetching a rendered texture from the the GPU or by creating a smaller one from the terrain layers ourself. Or we could just position a camera over the world and render it as it is.
Performance is key, so whatever approach we go for needs to be optimized, and able to handle updated.
The best performance might be gotten from a delayed camera, which renders the terrain from an altitude, either with the actual world, or with just a couple of simple quads. This rendering can be updated at an interval (10 sec?) to accommodate changes to the terrain. Since we now calculate all shadows on the CPU we can easily go with simple quads and still get the correct shading.
Blueprint information
- Status:
- Complete
- Approver:
- Erik Ogenvik
- Priority:
- Medium
- Drafter:
- Erik Ogenvik
- Direction:
- Needs approval
- Assignee:
- Erik Ogenvik
- Definition:
- Approved
- Series goal:
- None
- Implementation:
- Implemented
- Milestone target:
- 0.5.5
- Started by
- Erik Ogenvik
- Completed by
- Erik Ogenvik
Related branches
Related bugs
Sprints
Whiteboard
One simple and perhaps most efficient solution would be to position a camera at a certain distance in the sky, looking down, and tell it to only render geometry contained in certain render queues. These queues should include the static geometry as well as the water plane.
That way we don't need to use a different scene manager and can actually render the world as it is.
The best way to implement this currently would be to use a combination of Ogre composition (for generating the round texture) and CEGUI elements (for buttons etc.). The map won't rotate when the player rotates, instead north will always be up (mainly because it's just easier, we might add it in the future).
When this is complete we'll do a 0.5.5 release.
Work Items
Dependency tree
* Blueprints in grey have been implemented.