Commander Map

Download Code File

To use this resource:

1. Copy guiCommanderHud.cc to your engine/gui subfolder.
2. Open your IDE of choice (or a text editor if that's what you like).
3. Add the source file to your project so it will be compiled into Torque.
4. Do a clean rebuild.
5. Go to the GUI of your choice and add a GuiCommanderHud to it. Poof, instant GUI!

Security and Scoping Issues:

The HUD is designed to prevent people from abusing it in-game. It does not change how anything is scoped, so people will only see what the net code would have previously allowed them to see. If you want to have a special "commander map" behavior that shows all active objects you will need to add it either via server side scripting or in GameConnection::doneScopingScene(). Remember, the best way to prevent cheating and improve net performance on your game is to only scope what people need to see.

If you're particularly paranoid, you may want to remove the ConsoleMethods at the end of the file and control the commander map with events; this is probably unnecessary in most cases, as the commander map reveals no more information than the player could get by opening a map in single player mode or a dedicated server and flying/walking around.

Panning and Zooming:

There are three useful actions you can do via scripting with the GuiCommanderHud. First, you can zoom. This basically consists of changing the FOV of the overhead camera that the view is being rendered from (see GuiCommanderHud::processCameraQuery()), so you want to stick to values between 0 and one half pi. Larger values can give "interesting" results though no value should crash the engine. The available script methods for this are zoom() to instantly set the zoom level and zoomTo() to smoothly interpolate to the requested zoom level.

pan() and panTo() let you set the x,y co-ordinates of the overhead camera - essentially setting where the center of the map is. If you wish to pan onto an object, get the first two words of its position and pass them to pan() or panTo().

There are also two exposed fields, panSpeed and zoomSpeed, which let you tweak how quickly panning and zooming occurs. Negative values for these will give catastrophic results!

Performance:

On a 1.8Ghz P4 with 512mb of RAM and a GeForce 4 440 Go (equivalent to a fast GeForce 2), I get 70fps in the test FPS level without the map on screen, and 40fps with it on the screen (in addition to the normal FPS view). Suggested usage is to run the GuiCommanderHud in its own GUI, so that you don't have the overhead of the PlayGUI and its view of the world.

The GuiCommanderHud only renders interior, terrain, water, and environmental objects. You can easily change the mask it uses for rendering the scene by editing GuiCommanderHud::renderWorld() - there is a comment to guide you. Re-enabling all DTS shapes will bring a significant performance hit, since you'll be rendering potentially all the objects in the game world!

Extensions:

There are three major areas in which the GuiCommanderHud could be extended for your game.

First, you may want to render an overlay or icons indicating where objectives/players are. There is a comment located where you would want to render these objects, in GuiCommanderHud::onRender(). Using standard DGL calls will give good results.

Second, you may want to have the control handle mouse input. Looking at EditTSCtrl (located in engine/editor/editTSCtrl.*) will be an excellent guide for this process. You could either inherit from EditTSCtrl, or copy its mouse handling code to the GuiCommanderHud. The project() and unproject() functions that GuiCommmanderHud inherits from GuiTSCtrl may also be useful here.

Finally, you may wish to optimize rendering speed by caching output to a texture, rendering only the texture, and updating the texture as needed when the map needs to change its view. (You could even render to a large texture and simply pan it around, though this would kill the neat parallaxing and depth buffering effects that you could gain from actually rendering the world into the GuiCommanderHud.) This would be a bit tricky, but GuiCommanderHud::onRender would be your starting point. Look at TSShapeInstance::snapshot() for guidance on how to implement this sort of functionality in OpenGL - beware that the DirectX layer may not place nice with this.

Usage Restrictions:

None. Knock yourself out! :) I would ask that you put my name in your credits somewhere and send me a free copy of your game if this resource is a major piece of functionality for your project, but you are by no means required to do so. I'd also appreciate it if, if you found bugs or made enhancements for the code, if you'd send me your change(s) so I can merge them back into this resource. Many eyes find more bugs. ;)

Addendums:

Neat bit of code to try from the console(replace 1494 with the SimObject you want to track). Notice my commander hud is named commHud.

commHud.zoomTo(0.02);
function panPlayer() { commHud.panTo(getWord(1494.getPosition(), 0), getWord(1494.getPosition(), 1)); schedule(100, 0, panPlayer); }
panPlayer();