Minimap

Minimap

It’s a minimap!

This is partly inspired by the OpenTTD minimap which was always helpful in finding out the locations of industries and giving a broad overview.

I always felt this was missing from Transport Fever 2. Interestingly, there is a minimap for map generation but you cannot access it from the normal game mode. So I had to build this “from scracth” but tried to give it a similar look and feel to that map.

Features:
– a basic terrain height that shows hills and rivers
– towns indicated with the standard icon that is clickable (jump to location) and mouse-over tooltip shows the town name
– industries are indicated with the icon of their output cargo, like towns are clickable and names in the tooltip
– major roads are drawn with some exceptions (see below)
– railway tracks are drawn
– an outline of the current camera position is shown
– everything shown on the map can be toggled on and off

Limitations:
– To paint the terrain I had to use components and styles, creating too many can cause game lag so I have reduced the resolution which seems to be a reasonable compromise between a blocky look and the impact on the UI
– There are some hard limits in the game on how many lines can be rendered, exceeding this results in an ungraceful crash to the desktop! The map will not allow this to happen, so it sacrifices drawing urban streets, and the second track in a pair of double tracks (as you wouldn’t see anyway). In very large/busy maps it is possible to hit this limit and the rendering is cut off, so there may be random gaps in the network.

Let me know how you get on and any requests in the comments below!