Hi,

I guess most of you have seen the pics going around .spam, so I might as well paste some more pics and explination here...

Mapoverview
This is a new HUD element I've made for ezquake, it shows a small image of the map and plots where they players are in realtime. This ONLY WORKS WITH MVD's.

Frags
As you can see on the screenshots there is some additional information next to the frags also, so that you can easily see the status of the different players RL's/armor/health/powerups when watching a demo. A total count for the number of RL's per team can also be enabled for the teamfrags hud element.

How does it work?
The map picture is not automatically generated or anything, it's just an image file that has to be created for each map you want to be able to show the mapoverview on. What also is needed is a conversion formula so that the quake coordinates can be translated into pixel coordinates for that particular picture. I have created a program that makes this easier (see pictures below).

Steps to create a map image:

1. Log onto a qizmo and join a server and change the map to the one you want to create the map picture for.

2. Create a new .loc-file using Qizmo and go around the level marking spots that are easy to pinpoint (corners are preffered, because they're hard to miss). Name the locations in such a way that you will remember where they are located later on.

3. Convert the .bsp-file to a .map file (or just use the original .map file) and load it into your favourite quake-mapping tool and take a screenshot of the entire level seen from above.

4. Open the screenshot in your favourite image editor and create a satisfactory map picture using this "blueprint". Save the picture as a .png

5. Open my program (not yet released), load the .png + .loc-file into the program.

6. Drag the locations that you marked in the .loc-file with qizmo onto the picture. The more spots you have, the smaller the error will be for the conversion formula.

7. Save the conversion formula to the .png-file... (ezquake will then read the conversion formula from this when it plots the players).

8. Name the .png to the same name as the map name and put it in qw/mapoverviews/

That's it

I will put up a complete instruction/tutorial when I'm done with everything.

Some pics of the new hud-element.






Some pics of the program that creates the conversion formula.



// Cokeman

that's insane! really cool
where did you get the idea? and could this be used when spectating too?

As this is only for MVD's i guess it won't be possible to use when spectating. However, a discussion went on a couple of hours ago in #Quakeworld where they said it would be possible to use with QTV as QTV is in fact streaming MVD's. (Or something along those lines :p)

Nice work.

Well I made this initially to plot stuff when parsing demos for stats (which I'm still planning to do, the demo parser part is the hard part) ... Then I realized it wouldn't be hard to add the same thing "live" to quake, so I did.

// Cokeman

Well is it hard to make it work with spectating?
If not then do it

Yea only works with MVD's, since you don't have all the info of where all the players are when just spectating ;/

I don't know much about QTV, but when it gets moved into ezQuake "for real" instead of running as an external app, it would be possible to watch live matches using this.

// Cokeman

That's a great idea. It's amazing that no one thought of it before, because it's such a useful tool for following big 4on4 matches.

If there was some way for the commentators to implement it into their routine, it would make their jobs a lot easier and the commentating more accurate.

Well done.

nice work... this idea came from counter-strike i guess... =]
and how we add this hud element in ezquake?? new build ? plugin? etc..

Counterstrike?!?! wtf.... No

It will be in the next build of ezquake.

// Cokeman

It's been done before...kinda. There's a seven year old standalone program, that lets you view/analyse .qwds in 3D

try it in FTE first?

OOh, cool stuff Ponk... You should release the source for that

// Cokeman

this map overview stuff is something that cs has it built-in in spectator mode.. thought u got ur idea from that =]

yup, done in CS... but cut the shit....

will this work in linux?

So, where can we get it?

A.w.e.s.o.m.e.-o.

A very good idea but not quite new indeed.
The program posted by Ponk was made by OCR-Iwan in '98 already and Jjonez suggested the following as fa rback as march 2001:



Colour shading would be cool indeed.

didnt read all posts.. anyways..
wouldnt the radar show players close to yourself when playing 4v4?

willgurht: na, does not work while playing. it's demoviewing/spectating related

cokeman: very nice, commentators will "love" you for that one colouring safe/lost areas or quad player blend should be possible, he?

add names to the dots too

I've been thinking up a scheme of doing something like that, but it's only in my head so far... But it's a possibility, yes


Been thinking about doing that also, but the normal font is way too big for that, they would be in the way. So to do that I'd have to make a small charset.

You could just assign a number, or even a different shade of that team's colour to each player, and then represent them using that number and/or colour on the map.

when u record a qwd and convert it to mvd, you are able to watch povs of players being close to the one recording the qwd. So if you enabled this hud item when playing, it would kinda work..

obvious cheat, but still... some people use aimbots or ghost.

It's not gonna work while playing. You still need to enable the command (which for obvious reasons wont work while playing) to gain anything out of this.

it's like saying cl_autoid 1 can be used as a cheat in Fuhquake, but that command only works while watching demos.

the cvar scr_autoid 1, which displays player names on top of the player models, work as spectator and demo viewing modes.... both in ezquake and fuh above 0.30

spectator != player