Maps and Minimaps Code Plugin

Yes, that will be the case! I just changed the way its tweakable, instead of projecting in the camera direction you simply configure the direct Z-distance between the camera and the floor. I’ll demonstrate this in the tutorial video I’m working on.

Glad to hear it! Yes geometrical math can be a pain in the *** and not everyone enjoys fiddling with it. I have a background in computer graphics which definitely helps a lot here.

New feature: Icon size in world space


I’ve been working on a feature that I thought would be generally useful. You can now choose whether you want to define your icon’s size in world space or screen space:

  • If you set your icon size in screen space, that means the icon will always be the same size no matter the zoom level. The icon size is in pixels.
  • If you set your icon size in world space, that means the icon will scale down/up when you zoom in/out. The icon size is the diameter in world units, so if you set it to 500, it will always cover exactly 500x500 world units on the minimap. As a result, you can now use icons to represent areas, for example for quests. You can set any icon’s Z order to make sure certain icons are always rendered over or under other icons.

Here is a screenshot of all the current settings for icons:

https://s23.postimg.org/w1ei4attn/settings.png

It’s looking so powerful!

I was wondering if thiswas your work, but it’s not. Im going to patiently wait for yours :stuck_out_tongue:

EDIT: How much do you plan to charge for this?

EDIT2: Do you plan to add some sort of “reveal / hide” feature, to simulate the fact that the player “discovers” the map as he progresses through it? Like this:
f86a44644bbe035fb0cbef12e8e6924192909fda.jpeg

Hey Yun-Kun, thanks for being patient! I’ve finished working on the plugin’s features and finished tidying up and commenting all code. Its submitted to the marketplace and I’m working to get it available there as soon as possible. From my experience this could run into the start of February, that is if it gets accepted. That blueprint minimap you linked looks pretty good. Its good to have variations, like that one seems a good pick pricing-wise if you for example just need a simple radar-like display.

As for this code plugin, it will be $70 including VAT, or around €65 including VAT. I realize that puts it a bit higher than the existing minimap plugins, but my focus with this plugin has been ease of use, performance and most of all completeness. My biggest concern when purchasing blueprints or code plugins for my own project is to find out that I’m missing a feature and then finding out its difficult implement that feature in the blueprint or code plugin I just purchased. Some good examples are the white trapezoid that Zireael mentioned and from my own experience working on games professionally I always find that at some point your game goes into the polish stage and you’ll want to add fancy animations and mouse-over tooltips to everything, so including the minimap! That’s why I felt it important to include animations out of the box and the ability to hook up custom animations. Another thing I learned is that as your level becomes larger, you may want to split up your background texture into different areas and I think its important a minmap system supports that. So my approach with this plugin is completeness, I do believe it offers features that others lack (although whether you need them depends on your game of course), and any feature requests that add to the completeness of this plugin are always welcome.

As for hiding and revealing the map, currently a limited variation of that is possible: you can use multiple background textures for different areas and toggle them on or off individually. You can use this for example to make a player discover a map MMO style: entering a town would reveal that town’s part of the map, for example. Now in Diablo I know that you really explore a radius around the player. That currently isn’t possible but it is a neat idea that I think many other people could also use for their dungeon crawler type games. Right now I’m focusing on getting this thing on the marketplace first and I’m finishing up on the video tutorial, but I’ll definitely keep this idea in mind for a first update.

Announcement

Hey everyone, I will be postponing the release of this plugin to work on adding MOBA-inspired and Diablo-inspired fog of war rendering to the minimap.
**MOBA-inspired fog of war: ** You will be able to specify which actors give vision on the minimap. A radius around the area will be revealed. Vision is temporary: as the actor is moved the old location is in fog of war again.
**Diablo-inspired fog of war: ** Same as above, but areas once revealed are always revealed.
Areas of the map in fog of war can be rendered completely dark or just slightly darkened. Icons can be marked to always show or only show when their location is revealed. This feature will not take into account line of sight, this falls outside the scope of the plugin, but I will leave commentary in code that should help any programmer that wants to build this.

I will post work in progress videos of this feature next week. Stay tuned!

throwing money at my screen

nothing comes out

Can’t wait for the release! I’m channeling my small part of the greater almighty beam of motivation towards you.

Great addition! just curious if you had put any thought into spherical levels/worlds and if its possible using this?

Hah, I was wondering whether someone would request this! Unfortunately, currently its not possible due to some of the computations assuming Euler/positional coordinates and the world Z-axis being the minimap’s up vector. These are limitations but also make the computations slightly cheaper for games that adhere to this. I feel games with spherical worlds are too specific to invest time for now, but if more people request this I will brush up my 3D spherical coordinates math and give it a try.

Thank you! Hate to keep you waiting. :slight_smile:

I am making nice progress on the fog+exploration mechanic. Have a look:

This looks fantastic. I will be looking forward to it!

It always seem to be that way for me at the moment with features or additions onto marketplace items, I guess the tiny bit of solace I can take is that there are not hundreds of people with the same ideas.

Sorry to hear that, I can imagine a lot of plugins with 3D calculations don’t work with spherical worlds.

I’ve made some nice progress on fog of war again.

Post process effect for world fog
At some point I realized that since I’m building fog of war data already, I could perhaps write a post processing effect that applies the fog to the world as well. So I did, check it out! So when you get this plugin, you will have a minimap, and a fog of war system that applies to the minimap and the world. :slight_smile: So in this video, both the treasure chests reveal fog. The player initially only reveals fog temporarily (like MOBA units) and then I turn on permanent revealing (like in hack and slash games).

Make fog affect gameplay
You will be able to retrieve per world position whether it is in fog (and if so, how much fog: 0-100%) so that the fog can affect your gameplay. This does a texture read from your GPU, which is a relatively costly operation, but the texture data is cached after the first request of every frame. So even if you do 100 fog checks per frame, it will only do one texture read. If you don’t use this feature, the texture is never read.

So, freaking, awesome!

I’m patiently waiting, building up my own Plugin. I’ll buy yours whenever it’s ready and I’ll improve my A-RPG Prototype with it.

GL HF for your work :slight_smile:

Just a little update. I’m currently working on an updated and improved trailer. In preparation for this I have included the plugin in multiple of the example/learning projects in the launcher like ShooterGame and TopDownDemo.

Here is a preview of what I’ll be showing in the new trailer, which will focus more on showing real game scenarios:

Implementation wise all features I want in are working great, including the recently added fog of war ideas. The code for the first release is about complete, but as I’ve been adding the minimap to the example projects I’ve found some more ways to improve ease of use, reducing the number of steps you guys would have to do to get a minimap in-game. I’m also going over the code quite often to see if any blueprint exposed variables can benefit from better naming or tooltips. :slight_smile:

Thank you! What kind of plugin are you building? Is it something you’re going to release?

Epic’s guidelines state not to use too generic naming, so I’m giving the plugin an actual name. “Minimap Code Plugin” will now be known as
Journeyman’s Minimap

So when you see this on the Marketplace sub forums in the near future, know that its the same one. :slight_smile:

Awesome!

Can I understand you’ve submitted it then?

Yep, its submitted so the ball is rolling!

minimap + fog of war ? even better :slight_smile: good luck!

Thanks! :slight_smile:

I’ve created a new thread on the Marketplace forums, please post any new replies there.