Hello.
I’m wondering what is the best way to do a minimap in tiled games? I would like a minimap like in starcraft for example, a small box in the corner of the screen that shows layout of the world.
I’m using Slick as game engine. Rendering whole world and scaling down is not a option. So far I have idea that for every terrain area tile I designate a color, then in minimap for every tile I render the color of the tile. I think this would be very slow, what is the best way to do a minimap? Thanks.
I don’t see why it would not be possible to render the whole world and scale down, or use a different color for each terrain tile type. You will need to do the rendering only once, when the level is loaded. After that the minimap is just a static image, over which you draw the positions of the player and other game objects.
One color per tile and one tile per pixel is by far the easiest and fastest solution, and is what I use whenever I need a minimap.
Rendering the entire world and scaling down is just amazingly slow and resource intensive, but it does save the problem of having to decide what color each tile should have on the minimap.