Help| How to make circle minimap on Free License

Unity Engine
1

How can i make a circle minimap on Free License

2

Cant remember if this will work now as ive been on pro for so long, but I recall doing something like

  1. Creating a 2DTexture to store the minimap
  2. Rendering the pixels into it. I originally did a greyscale version by getting the terrain height data
  3. Displaying using a masked shader
3

can you explain it more better please?

4

Have you check out the Bootcamp Demo? I believe there is a round minimap in it!

5

Unfortunately, Render-to-texture is a Pro-only feature. I wish it wasn’t.

The only practical way to make a round mini-map without the Pro license is to make it much like a billboard sprite. Basically… Use any 3D modeling software to create a polygonal disc with the proper UV coordinates to map the mini-map texture flatly to the disc’s surface. Then you can scroll the mini-map by changing the texture UV offset via Material.SetTextureOffset.

Search Unity Answers for example code.
http://answers.unity3d.com/questions/19848/making-textures-scroll-animate-textures.html

6

UP.

7

UP.

8

You don’t have to use render to texture. Just use another camera with depth clear on it. Grab this shader:

Shader "Minimap/TextureMask" {
   Properties
   {
      _Mask ("Culling Mask", 2D) = "white" {}
      _Cutoff ("Alpha cutoff", Range (0,1)) = 0.5
   }

   SubShader
   {
        Tags {"Queue" = "Background"} 
        Blend SrcAlpha OneMinusSrcAlpha 
        Lighting Off 
        ZWrite On 
        ZTest Always
        Alphatest LEqual [_Cutoff]
        Pass
        {
            SetTexture [_Mask] {combine texture}
        }
   }
}

I can’t remember where I got this shader from, but it was on these forums, when doing a search for round minimap.

So with the above shader, get yourself a white circle on black background texture. Make alpha from grayscale on that texture when importing.

Make a new material with this shader and texture and assign it to a plane.
Parent the plane in front of the second camera, so that it covers all of the view, and moves with the second camera.

Voila. Everything in back of the plane, will be clipped from the view. Resize and position this second camera as necessary. If you’d like to make a border, assign that texture to a different plane and place it in front of the masking plane.

9

Im not talking about using render to texture…

10

Doing that every frame is pretty expensive, though you most likely don’t have to do it every frame for a minimap.

Also consider that you can set a camera’s depth and give it a rectangle to render into.

It’s also worth playing with alpha. I’m not sure about directly rendering to the screen, but when you render to a texture the alpha component of the rendered objects is retained in the output buffer.

11

I wasnt suggesting doing it every frame. That would just be retarded. Once you have your minimap texture, you’re free to move/clip as needed.

I played around with using multiple cameras, but it seemed like vertex counts doubled… granted this was one of the earlier things I did with Unity (when I was somewhat clueless), so it wasnt done terribly well.