Top-Down Mini-Map Live Update While Driving

R0J0hound - Any suggestions?

I’m on my phone but I may have one idea. Could be vastly different to your project, idk.

So I’m guessing you have something like this currently:

Set marker position to minimap.x + enemy.x/32, minimap.y + enemy.y/32

If the minimap is 1/32 scale

Relative, just mean subtract the players position from the enemy position.

Set marker position to minimap.x +(enemy.x-player.x)/32, minimap.y + (enemy.y-player.y)/32

I will give that a try. Thank you!

Alrighty... So, what you're sharing makes sense, but I think I failed to explain what I'm trying to do clearly.

Pardon some redundancy...

The minimap won't show the ENTIRE set of roads and buildings, etc. Just the immediate radius surrounding the player car. So, as the car moves and passes by buildings, the respective icon on the map will show the player car passing by a building. The car icon always dead-center in the map, of course. As mentioned, I'm able to get the building and road icons to appear appropriately on the map, but I'm having trouble figuring out how to get the icons to "move" on their layer (which is parallax 0x0). My efforts to use lerp have failed (kinda...).

(Not that it matters much towards the problem I'm having, I have the icons set to a blend mode so that they ONLY appear while overlapping the minimap white outline object. Just in case that helps to set the picture as clearly as possible of what I'm attempting to do.)

Thanks again for your time and patience.

Further update...

My apologies, unless you haven't looked at my .c3p yet, one thing I didn't clarify about my set up is that I have another object on the minimap (which will be invisible) that all the map icons are pinned to (except for the one representing the player car.

This object (with said icons) moves along the minimap outline to represent map movement as the car moves.

SO FAR, since my last update, I've been able to get things to move. NOW my only problem is getting the INITIAL orientation of this object to appear correctly so that the car icon appears in the accurate position relative to the actual player car. Meaning, if the car is actually to the left of a building, the minimap still shows the car icon appearing somewhere...else.

Here's the current action I have for the updated map icons...

Set position for Map_BG object:

X position -> lerp(HUDborderMiniMap.X-HUDborderMiniMap.Width/2,HUDborderMiniMap.X+HUDborderMiniMap.Width/2,1-unlerp(0,LayoutWidth,Car.X))

Y position -> lerp(HUDborderMiniMap.X-HUDborderMiniMap.Height/2,HUDborderMiniMap.Y+HUDborderMiniMap.Height/2,1-unlerp(0,LayoutWidth,Car.Y))

The idea here, as you can see, is to take the (un)lerp position of the player car object - with the ranges of the width and height of the layout - and use that fractional value to determine how to place the Map_BG object (which has all the minimap icons pinned to it). Thus making the minimap do what it's supposed to. Unfortunately, the best I've been able to do is to get the map to move appropriately but not show the car icon in the right place (which means the Map_BG object isn't updating accordingly). The link I provided in my original post should take you to the updated save file.

The idea I gave should still work. No need to use lerp, and it will automatically center the minimap on the player. This example just maps everything but you can add a distance check before adding things to the map.

dropbox.com/s/zdtztrfrl4q7p1x/car_streets_minimap.capx

I also was messing around with some traffic. No behaviors, and a manually laid out road map. Works decently, although the ai seems to have some road rage issues. They seem to like to tailgate, and slow down when someone is behind them, not to mention all the collisions. I was attempting for some more orderly stuff.

Maybe useful for some ideas.

Forgive me...

I'm just not getting it. Everything I've attempted so far - including using your solution - just isn't working.

I tried to open your .capx but it's telling me there's something concerning the poly_pts and it won't load for me.

Ashley - I know you're busy, but do you have a moment to look over this?

The capx is working here. I don't know what's amiss.

Here's basically the events. It's like my previous post, and it does what you're describing. The minimap is centered on the player and is scaled down from the level size. It creates markers from everything, but if you only want the buildings close, you can add another condition to the for each loops like:

distance(building.x, building.y, player.x, player.y) > 200

every tick
-- destroy playerMarker
-- destroy EnemyMarker
-- destroy BuildingMarker
-- create playerMarker at minimap.x, minimap.y
-- playerMarker: set size to player.width/10, player.height/10
-- playerMarker: set angle to player.angle


for each building
-- create buildingMarker at minimap.x +(building.x-player.x)/10, minimap.y + (building.y-player.y)/10
-- buildingMarker: set size to building.width/10, building.height/10
-- buildingMarker: set angle to building.angle

for each enemy
-- create enemyMarker at minimap.x +(enemy.x-player.x)/10, minimap.y + (enemy.y-player.y)/10
-- enemyMarker: set size to enemy.width/10, enemy.height/10
-- enemyMarker: set angle to enemy.angle

Sorry for all the trouble...but it worked after all, just like you said. I'm not sure where my issue was coming from when I tried it earlier. But it's all working now as I hoped for.

Thank you for coming to my rescue once again. :)