Feature request: Custom minimap markers & better support for waypoints

[cosmicvole]

Hi voxel lovers, this is my first post here but I have been enjoying what became Luanti for nearly 4 years.

I was looking for a way to draw custom arrows and markers onto the minimap to aid navigation to quest locations, but looking at the code it seems to currently be impossible without changing the Luanti client. It would be a very useful feature to have. Are there any plans to add such a capability to Luanti?

It seems like the best option we have at the moment is how the game Exile https://content.luanti.org/packages/Mantar/exile/ does it with a separate compass (Wayfinder) that points to waypoint nodes (Waystone).

I saw Luanti has something called "image_waypoint" but I don't fully understand what this does. The docs say:

"Same as `image`, but does not accept a `position`; the position is instead determined by `world_pos`, the world position of the waypoint."

So is image_waypoint supposed to be for things like floating arrows overlaid on the world in 3D space? I couldn't find a game that actually uses them other than devtest with its hudwaypoints command and even then I couldn't get that to work. ☹

[Blockhead]

Hi voxel lovers, this is my first post here but I have been enjoying what became Luanti for nearly 4 years.

Hi, welcome to the forums :)

I was looking for a way to draw custom arrows and markers onto the minimap to aid navigation to quest locations, but looking at the code it seems to currently be impossible without changing the Luanti client. It would be a very useful feature to have. Are there any plans to add such a capability to Luanti?

It seems like the best option we have at the moment is how the game Exile https://content.luanti.org/packages/Mantar/exile/ does it with a separate compass (Wayfinder) that points to waypoint nodes (Waystone).

The closest issues I could find are #11966 Improve minimap which has "Add markers on minimap with API and custom styling" as one of its points, and #8429 More minimap HUD flags is kind of close. Neither has had a lot of discussion, nor have they been outright rejected either, so it is mostly up to a potential contributor to bring forward code changes and hopefully have them accepted.

I saw Luanti has something called "image_waypoint" but I don't fully understand what this does. The docs say:

"Same as `image`, but does not accept a `position`; the position is instead determined by `world_pos`, the world position of the waypoint."

So is image_waypoint supposed to be for things like floating arrows overlaid on the world in 3D space? I couldn't find a game that actually uses them other than devtest with its hudwaypoints command and even then I couldn't get that to work. ☹

Yes, it works inside the world space.

[cosmicvole]

Hi, welcome to the forums :)

Thanks :)

The closest issues I could find are #11966 Improve minimap which has "Add markers on minimap with API and custom styling" as one of its points, and #8429 More minimap HUD flags is kind of close.

Thanks for digging those out. Wow, they are getting old.

Neither has had a lot of discussion, nor have they been outright rejected either, so it is mostly up to a potential contributor to bring forward code changes and hopefully have them accepted.

Well that could end up being me, eventually. We'll have to wait and see.

Yes, it works inside the world space.

OK when I ran the devtest game I never got them to work but I didn't spend very long as the image_waypoints are not quite what I was looking for at the moment.

Just in case anyone's interested I did try and think of any possible ways of enhancing the existing minimap from game code.

Firstly I started to look at fitting an arrow icon into the small space around the outer circumference of the minimap. I pretty much gave up on this idea, because Luanti does not allow games to get the dimensions of screen elements in pixels, by design, yet the minimap resizes itself based on the screen size so it is fiendishly difficult to position a HUD element exactly around it.

The other idea I wondered about is if you could make nodes in the world that would be visible on the minimap but not to players looking at the world. Maybe have an unbreakable transparent layer very high up in the sky, with nodes above it that are only textured on the top, so you can see the tops of them on the map but not see them from underneath in the world below. Or if there is already some kind of hack to just make a node render differently on the minimap to in the world?

[cosmicvole]

The other idea I wondered about is if you could make nodes in the world that would be visible on the minimap but not to players looking at the world. Maybe have an unbreakable transparent layer very high up in the sky, with nodes above it that are only textured on the top, so you can see the tops of them on the map but not see them from underneath in the world below.

I have done some testing in creative mode and it does seem like this idea could be made to work. If you make a large floating X or similar up in the sky, it is visible on the minimap when walking around on the ground.

Unfortunately it does disappear from the map if it is too high up as it exceeds the minimap draw distance (I think the maximum is 64 or 128 blocks above the player depending on if the minimap is in double height mode). For a single player, this could be worked around by writing a mod to move the blocks higher when a player moves above ground level near the marker.

On multiplayer the technique will obviously break if one player remains at ground level while another climbs up to the marker's height. I don't think we could avoid a situation where either one of the players can approach and see the marker object in the world, or we move the marker too high and it disappears off the minimap for lower players.

It is a pity there is no way to texture nodes differently for different players (as far as I know) otherwise it would be easy to hide the marker objects from players that get too near to them.

[cosmicvole]

I will keep thinking about this idea. I might be able to do it using entities as the markers. If I can get something working well I might write a quest marker mod.

[cosmicvole]

luantimultimapmarkerzoomedout.png (36.05 KiB) Viewed 331 times

luantimultimapmarkerzoomedin.png (40.71 KiB) Viewed 331 times

I got these markers working by placing a schematic in the air above the quest location.

By using alpha blending, the markers are pretty much invisible in the world but they draw on the map because that ignores alpha values on the colorize modifier:

Code: Select all

tiles = {"quest_marker.png^[colorize:#ff000001:255"}

The biggest limitation of this is that on multiplayer once a quest location is discovered by someone, all players that visit that area will be able to see the quest marker on the minimap. I don't think there is any way around this until Luanti gets a way to send different node textures to different players from the server. I couldn't use entities for this because they don't show up on the minimap, only the nodes do AFAICT.

I will probably turn this into a mod at some point if I finish it off.

[Blockhead]

That's a nice workaround, hopefully others can benefit and also one day it will be obsolete

[Astrobe]

So is image_waypoint supposed to be for things like floating arrows overlaid on the world in 3D space? I couldn't find a game that actually uses them other than devtest with its hudwaypoints command and even then I couldn't get that to work. ☹

My game does use text waypoints, mainly to mark the "home" position (which is attached to "beacon" block), and players can use a compass item (which doesn't work like any other compass mod I know of) on another type of beacon ("dungeon beacon") to set a second waypoint. Unfortunately my source is a bit of a mess (to say the least) :

https://gitlab.com/Astrobe/minefall/-/b ... plain=1#L9 ("home beacon")
https://gitlab.com/Astrobe/minefall/-/b ... e=heads#L8 (compass)
https://gitlab.com/Astrobe/minefall/-/b ... heads#L102 ("dungeon beacon")

As for marking things on the minimap, I would try to use the "show on minimap" property for entities e.g. :

https://gitlab.com/Astrobe/minefall/-/b ... heads#L145

I don't know if it combines as expected with the newer properties that let players see only certain entities.

There's a minetest.conf setting which tells the engine how far entities should be displayed, that may need to be increased to fit the max range of the minimap.

[cosmicvole]

My game does use text waypoints, mainly to mark the "home" position (which is attached to "beacon" block), and players can use a compass item (which doesn't work like any other compass mod I know of) on another type of beacon ("dungeon beacon") to set a second waypoint. Unfortunately my source is a bit of a mess (to say the least) :

As for marking things on the minimap, I would try to use the "show on minimap" property for entities e.g. :

https://gitlab.com/Astrobe/minefall/-/b ... heads#L145

I don't know if it combines as expected with the newer properties that let players see only certain entities.

There's a minetest.conf setting which tells the engine how far entities should be displayed, that may need to be increased to fit the max range of the minimap.

Really helpful info, thank you!

Yes I see now that other players and entities with show_on_minimap = true should show up as red blobs on the minimap. I have never got those to work yet but I just checked and this is slightly embarrassing but I am still running Minetest 5.3.0 from 2020! Needless to say I will be updating soon and try again.

I will probably still try and develop my technique for custom markers as it would be useful to color code them and tell them apart from players and mobs.

[Astrobe]

In my case I use it to help players locate some nearby NPCs, and it would be better if one could use e.g. a different colours for the spots on the minimap to help players distinguish them from other players.