Making a Mini-map

Mini-maps are common features of commercial games but a very rare sight in click games. Mainly because its perceived as quite a hard thing to do.. which indeed it is. However, it is in fact not quite as complicated as you might think. The complexity of the maths involved is actually pretty basic, its just a matter of building up all the basic components required and bringing them together. There is also the main difficulty of overcoming MMF itself which often requires some devious code. Sometimes you might get the feeling that you're having to trick MMF into doing what you want.

This tutorial shows how to make a mini-map using formula rather than inputting the specific numbers required for your particular requirements. This way you can simply place your mini-map in any situation and it will still work correctly. You could have a play field of 1024x768 or something ridiculous like 4500x5 and no matter the relative proportions of the mini-map itself it will still display the units location correctly.

When ever you can you should try to make things with formulae rather than specific numbers. You may have code throughout a programme that refers to a value that lets say happens to be 8. If you then realise you actually want that value to be 6, you might have to trawl through the whole code finding where you've used it. OR!!! you could have had the number 8 entered into an alterable value somewhere and used that. So when you want to tweak it, its just a matter of changing one value and all events relating to it will adapt accordingly

This download includes a mini-map tutorial as well as a few others.

~DOWNLOAD~
http://www.filefront.com/14525049/RTS_Tutorials.zip