[sldev] Option to make minimap display map data?

[Aimee Trescothick]

On 15 Jun 2009, at 21:23, Nexii Malthus wrote:

> Also it is ridicolously easy to add a "culling" for megaprims in the
> llnetmap.cpp file, I did this as a feature to my Vertical Life client
> such that it negates the impact of megaprims and revives the
> usefulness of the minimap.

Definitely agreed, makes a huge difference.
http://jira.secondlife.com/browse/VWR-12631
This may be a good candidate for Snowglobe on the next cycle.

> And to the question of additional useful data, I think it would be
> great to be able to differentiate higher or lower prims from the
> minimap. I think what could be done is incrementally darken or lighten
> the minimap objects based on height slightly, I think I am going to
> try this in my custom client.

Yes, I've been considering doing that too, there's a very elementary  
precedent for it now, in that prims below water level are drawn darker.

Personally I'd like to be able to choose a hybrid view, using the S3  
map texture as a mini-map background, and only draw objects live that  
have been updated within a certain amount of time, so exploring a long  
established sim you have the advantage of a properly rendered view,  
but will still see vehicles that are in motion, or the stuff someone's  
throwing at you for example.

There's a lot of other useful things that could be displayed as  
optional overlays, such as parcel boundaries, or chat range limits.  
I'd like to be able to select whichever combination of layers I want  
to see at the time.

An isometric scanner style representation is not as far-fetched as it  
may sound either, and has been proposed before (http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/User_Experience_Interest_Group/Transcripts/2009-01-15 
), heck, Acornsoft's Elite had it back in the 1980's and that was on a  
2Mhz 6502 with 32K   =)

Aimee.