[BUG][PLAYER] Minimap not positioning correctly after clicking on it

[IchoTolot]

Bitbucket: https://bitbucket.org/namida42/neolemmixplayer/issues/7/minimap-click-is-fairly-inaccurate-for

If I click on the minimap playing a big map with vertical scrolling, it repositions the screen far too high. ("Lemmings in Unison" is a great level to show this).

I am near the bottom and click on the right corner of the current displayed minimap and I am near the top instead of just a bit higher!
I expect it to get me ~ a normal level sze (160 pixels) higher insted of jumping right up all the way! In my opinion this makes the orientation in these type of level unnessesary difficult.

[namida]

It's not a bug per se; but it is probably very poorly designed. Rather than paying attention to where you clicked in terms of map position, it just checks where you clicked within the minimap rectangle, and positions based on that.

[mobius]

Is it very difficult to resize the minimap for taller levels do the whole map can be revealed there? I realize this would mean considering changing a lot of other things but as-is it's not consistent and very unhelpful imo; with ordinary horizontal levels the whole level is revealed but on tall levels it's not.

This isn't a great solution but: have the minimap grow or only display when you mouse over it.*

*I'll keep suggesting these type of suggestions, I don't care if nobody else like them.

[ccexplore]

This isn't a great solution but: have the minimap grow or only display when you mouse over it.

Honestly in this case, this is probably the best you can do.  The existing layout just doesn't work well with minimaps for vertical levels.  Unless you shrink the level down a lot further so that it all fits in that space, the only other choice is to only show the portion of the level that fits.  At least with the grow-on-hover you have the ability to get a full-level minimap even when it otherwise won't fit within the standard non-hover space.

It's also worth asking this:  if it's just about scrolling, would it actually work better to implement the sort of right-click scrolling like in Lix that Lix users seem to be very fond of, or does the minimap offer other meaningful advantages (ie. advantages people actually rely on) beyond scrolling?  With right-click scrolling, where your mouse cursor is relative to the top/bottom of the screen is scaled to the corresponding vertical position relative to the top/bottom boundaries of the level (or something along that line).

[mobius]

This isn't a great solution but: have the minimap grow or only display when you mouse over it.

Honestly in this case, this is probably the best you can do.  The existing layout just doesn't work well with minimaps for vertical levels.  Unless you shrink the level down a lot further so that it all fits in that space, the only other choice is to only show the portion of the level that fits.  At least with the grow-on-hover you have the ability to get a full-level minimap even when it otherwise won't fit within the standard non-hover space.

It's also worth asking this:  if it's just about scrolling, would it actually work better to implement the sort of right-click scrolling like in Lix that Lix users seem to be very fond of, or does the minimap offer other meaningful advantages (ie. advantages people actually rely on) beyond scrolling?  With right-click scrolling, where your mouse cursor is relative to the top/bottom of the screen is scaled to the corresponding vertical position relative to the top/bottom boundaries of the level (or something along that line).

Other meaningful advantages besides scrolling:
-previewing the entire map at once
-seeing where lemmings are, if lems off screen are in trouble; reminding you about a lemming you perhaps forgot
-quickly zapping to a location far away [by right clicking]
-I just like it.
I greatly miss the minimap in Lix.

[Simon]

reminding you about a lemming you perhaps forgot

Oh? And yet you argued against showing the save requirement during play?

I find this like for the minimap pretty interesting, thanks for the good list. In light of vertical levels, this needs a good solution. Starcraft needs the minimap direly, and reserves a much larger portion of the screen for it than Lemmings does.

-- Simon

[ccexplore]

As another example, Clones use a minimap that's only shown while holding down a hotkey.  It is shown as an overlay that's centered on the screen and actually takes up a good portion of it (so it basically obscures a good chunk of your view of the level itself while shown, though there might've been some translucency effects, I don't remember).  So it's able to use a much larger portion of screen real estate and is not forced to fit into a particular fixed-size box.

It's not exactly the best system, but I think any minimap that needs to work with varying level area dimensions will probably have to be some form of overlay that's shown and hidden on demand, at least to be functionally complete.  It is of note that when vertical scrolling was introduced starting in Lemmings 2, that was the version where they also started removing the minimap.  So probably DMA hit the same design difficulties, and with the technologies of the time, implementing an overlay may not even be technically feasible in some systems they'd want to target the game for.  And as far as I can remember, minimaps never made a comeback in any subsequent official games of the series.

And to be fair, even if right-click scrolling is as fast as a minimap in terms of scrolling, it does require you to have a rough idea in your head where you need to go in relation to the full span of the level area, while with the minimap it's more like visual targeting.  Being able to see lemmings outside of the current view area might also be useful, but I think in most cases, the minimap doesn't really show enough details to warn you effectively of lemmings-about-to-get-into-trouble sufficiently ahead of time (though arguably a few tweaks can improve on this front, such as flashing the lemmings that have just changed their actions, like finishing building or bashing or starting to fall).

[namida]

And as far as I can remember, minimaps never made a comeback in any subsequent official games of the series.

Lemmings 3D definitely has a minimap. But it's top-down in nature and of fairly limited usefulness (although I can think of at least one level where it comes in very handy while planning a solution). There are also some levels - usually enclosed ones - that disable it.

[mobius]

reminding you about a lemming you perhaps forgot

Oh? And yet you argued against showing the save requirement during play?

I find this like for the minimap pretty interesting, thanks for the good list. In light of vertical levels, this needs a good solution. Starcraft needs the minimap direly, and reserves a much larger portion of the screen for it than Lemmings does.

-- Simon

While I may have worded it poorly at the time, I wasn't arguing specifically against showing the save requirements in the menu bar; I was mainly arguing against putting too much info in the menu bar/ making it confusing. It turns out it works perfectly great the way the new updates; so I'm glad my fears were wrong.

Another point someone might have already made, is that a minimap is really mostly helpful on really big levels, especially what this topic is about. Not only with viewing the level but letting you warp to another location quickly. Obviously all of these things aren't really necessary; you can just pause and look around the whole level. But it's an aesthetic about the game that I really like.

[namida]

I'm thinking that the simplest solution to implement will indeed be some kind of popup minimap upon pressing (or more likely, holding) a hotkey. This could function, when visible, in much the same way the current one does.

This would also mean the space currently used by the minimap could be repurposed for clickable buttons for other common functions, such as saving / loading replays, fast forward, etc.