About Minimaps

[Secg]

I speculate that minimaps are automatically made by the AMRTS Studio after a mapmakers have finished shaping the terrains, painting the textures, as well as placing props & resources.

Even so, to what extent can minimaps be further updated? After I've moved resource objects their positions on the minimaps indeed change, yet what about props and textures?

Thanks in advance!

[TommyCD1]

The Studio should be auto generating a terrain.tga file whenever you save a map. The auto mini-map will render the terrain and the textures painted on it, as well as vaguely the geography of the map which can be seen by the ambient shadows cast by inclines. Everything else, such as the terrain coloring, props, or obviously any text or messages will have to be painted in or placed manually using a paint program.

The Dark Reign 2 studio still has a functionality that the Army Men RTS studio currently doesn't have though. By selecting the Terrain Tweak brush (key 3), you can press the 'Render' button to get a high resolution render of the terrain. The resolution of the image depends on the resolution you are running the game at, but by toggling the 'Colors' button to the right of the brush, you are able to render an image of the terrain with the terrain coloring enabled. You can even disable textures using the Graphics debug tool (Ctrl + Alt + G) and get a render with only the terrain colors without the textures, which you can then scale down and apply to your auto generated mini-map. Keep in mind that the ambient shadows will still be seen: to get rid of them you'll have to flatten the terrain before rendering.

As for props, I can only recommend the method that I use. I take a screenshot of the prop from a top down perspective in the studio, and then cut it out from the surrounding terrain and paste it onto my map, scaled down of course. Otherwise, I typically just borrow existing art from vanilla maps, such as the fortress walls on Mission 15 or This Old Fortress, or big props such as the pizza box or the doghouse.

The yellow and blue markers you can see on the mini-map ingame are added automatically. They do not need to be painted on at all. The same goes for team units and buildings, of course. This gives them the benefit of being dynamically created, meaning any adjustments made in the studio will reflect immediately in the mini-map, while everything else, namely colors and props, need to be repainted each time. I recommend saving your mini-map as the last step, or to keep some source files backed up.