UMG Minimap | Almost Plug and Play

[FONT=Century Gothic]UMG Minimap

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Marketplace link: UMG Mini Map in Blueprints - UE Marketplace


Most people probably don’t want to care about all the math to create a minimap and (almost) any game benefits from a minimap! So here’s my extremely customizable minimap which is very easy to use, it’s (almost) plug and play, and it’s 100% blueprint!

  • The minimap is orienting to a location and rotation you specify, for example the player, so it’s converting the world location to the location on the map.

  • If you use a landscape, the minimap automatically knows about all the dimentions and sets itself up to work correctly. If you do not use a landscape, you have to manually specify the “bottom left” and “top right” of the area which should be visible on the map.

  • You can smoothly zoom in and out the minimap with scrolling the mouse wheel while the mouse is over the minimap.

  • You can draw either colored points, textures or materials as points on the minimap, you just need to specify the world location, it’s one single node.

  • The minimap can draw arrows (color, material or texture) for points which are currently not visible on the minimap. The points then appear at the border of the minimap and point in the direction where the currently hidden point is.

  • You can either use the shape of a rectangle or a circle for the minimap. For the frame you can use any fitting texture you have, the minimap comes with 2 example frames, one rectangle and one circle.

  • If you click on the minimap, it can convert the click location to world location. It calls one function which gives you the world location and if you have specified a trace channel, the minimap automatically traces down against it, otherwise you will get a location with Z=0.

  • For the background of the minimap you can either let the minimap capture your level automatically or you can use your own texture. If you use your own texture, you can even change it any time during the game, so for example you could display multiple floors. If you choose the automatic capture, you can set how often the texture get’s updated, the minimap does not depend on updates.

  • If you want, you can lock the location, rotation and zoom of the minimap so that always the full map is visible.

Here’s a screenshot from the demo level which comes with the Minimap:

http://puu.sh/jsZuP/e200882f17.png

You can use it with any type of game. With the default settings it’s using a SceneCapture2D for getting the base image and you can specify how often this image is updated. If you don’t want to display Static Meshes on the image or they are not moving during runtime, you can basically just only take one image once since the minimap itself does not depend on this image!

You can also (and most game do this!) use your own background texture for the Minimap, so you can easily create a custom stylized background, like a real map for example.

And since the whole minimap is blueprint only you can easily modify it to your own needs!

Here is part 1 of a a very detailed tutorial series on how to configure the minimap:

**[CENTER]You can also watch:

Part 2 which is about how to draw arrows at the border of the Minimap
Part 3 which is about how to use the converted location after you click on the Minimap
Part 4 where I show you how you can select the point style for each instance of an actor individually in the level**

If you have any questions, let me know, I’m here to answer them all, or directly contact me via PM or at john.alcatraz@mailbox.org :cool:[/CENTER]

looks good, dose it work with network play?

Thanks! I have not yet tested it with any type of networking, but since it’s an UMG widget I don’t see any problems with networking :slight_smile: I believe this would be 100% client side, so it should not matter whether the game is singleplayer or multiplayer.

Welp, I am in need for a map system, so a few questions if I may:

  • Does this support “discoverables”. I need the user to see the entire map, but different areas need to be discovered. ESO is a good example.

  • As the question of net replication, I also need thr user to be able to sell / share the POI’S to other players. Could this do that?

You can set it to show the entire map without any problems. I don’t know what you mean with “discoverables”, I searched for ESO screenshots but there I can’t find any map… Something like that some area is black and you can’t see what’s there?

In what way is sharing POI (Points of Interest) with other players connected to the minimap? The minimap just calculates the position on the minimap out of world coordinates, but I think you would do your sharing of Point of Interests completely in World coordinates? Maybe you should explain a bit more what exactly your POIs should do :cool:

Map without anything “discovered” (with the exception of the diamond that is in the middle of the map)

Map with POI / Discoverables

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Basically, if someone shares a POI with another player, that POI would be visible on both players maps. The POI’s are just points of interests. Towns, cities, named mobs/boss locations, etc.

Then you could definitely do “discoverables”, you would just add new symbols to draw if the player has discovered something :slight_smile:

If you would want to share a POI with other players, you would just do it regularly with the world coordinates. Then the other player would have the world coordinates of this POI and his minimap would also show it. You give the minimap an array of Actors or Vectors to draw, what exactly the minimap should draw (what you give it in the arrays) is your game logic, not related to the minimap.

Gotcha :wink:

/10 characters

Is it hard to configure to make the level dimensions fit the texture dimensions?
Could it work to the same accuracy of say the system shock 2 mini map? Im worried that a non open map, say with corridors and what not. I know you use a screen capture, does that mitigate the issue?
Just curious if you have thought much about this to make implementation easier? With world space to a 2d texture this will always be some what of a problem i assume.
Fantastic work! I am very interested in this solution.

Im not sure about the amount of work that was put into this, but i feel like $5 to $10 dollers would be a fair price. If this product was $5 i would buy it just as an afternoon learning resource without even having a motivation to implement this and i feel i would not be alone.

Extremely easy, I put a lot of work in making this as easy as possible, so you just specify the bottom left and the top right of your level dimensions and it works! If you use a landscape, you don’t even have to do this since then the minimap just takes the landscape dimensions :cool:
Your map don’t need to have a specific origin and it does not need to have a specific size, the minimap will just work.

Regarding accuracy I am not sure, also depends on the size of your level. Close corridor levels are often smaller than big landscapes :rolleyes:

Thanks for the price suggestion, I would also like to hear other opinions on this :slight_smile:

I have created a video on how to configure my MiniMap in a new Project! You will see, it’s extremely simple :cool: Video is just so long because I talked a lot about everything :rolleyes:

If any mod could add a [Submitted] before the title of this thread this would be very nice :slight_smile:

Great and simple tutorial, Gives me much more confidence on being able to implement it.

More or less 10$ or 14$. I want to be the first to buy!

Thank you!

Not sure whether you will be able to be the first :wink: Thanks!

any news?:stuck_out_tongue:

I’m still waiting for Epic to put this on Trello :cool: They are a bit slow in reviewing this :rolleyes:

And here it its! It successfully passed Epics QA and is now up for vote on Trello! :cool:

So, if you are interested, please vote :slight_smile:

Voted! :slight_smile:

I’m already seeing it in my game

Voted. Good job. 8-}