✔️ NEW FEATURE: Map in Explorer Mode

[Krishty]

Explorer mode should display a small map so that you can see where you are. It’s annoying to spawn a plane just to look at a map on its MFD to find out if you are in the right place.

This had already been requested in the old Combatsim forums.

Should be no problem, as the terrain API provides a way to render the terrain map to any texture you like.

[Krishty]

“No problem” … not. We need to get rid of D3D9, it’s PITA every single time.

Anyway … I placed a minimap in the top-left corner of Explorer mode (i.e. not while in-game). It is drawn exactly like the MFD map, but 2D without special effects like LCD pixels.

Default range is 2× range of sight. This grows with speed as you move, so you can “look ahead”. It rotates with the viewer.

I experimented with larger maps, but had to abandon them due to the range of terrain sizes we need to support: 2000² for TAW, 1000² for EF2000/TFX, 100² for AC3 …

I had to add a small icon to the center to mark the current position; it was completely useless without.

2024-03-12 minimap 1.png (3.92 MiB) Viewed 89 times

2024-03-12 minimap 2.png (2.67 MiB) Viewed 89 times

There are still small problems to solve, but overall the maps are incredibly useful. I used to get lost in EF2000 maps all the time, and that stopped immediately. Finding a place has become very easy.

I try to design the icon rendering in a way that it can be used for AWACS / dynamic campaign mode later on.

[Krishty]

Ironically, I now need to improve the Red Sea moving map: It was never designed to be used beyond 200 nm, as the F-22 MFD cut off there. It looks like this:

image.png (863.25 KiB) Viewed 88 times

Extending it would quadruple the required processing power, and it’s already a resource hog. I’ll try and find a way to smoothly blend it into the 800×800 pixel overview bitmap.

[Krishty]

Code has landed. I didn’t bother fixing the TAW moving map for now.