Fix minimap anti-aliasing

[jez9999]

I've always been irritated by the fact that later patches screwed up the anti-aliasing of the minimap. It looks really ugly without the earlier anti-aliasing. Could the Thinker mod fix this? For comparison, here are examples of the earlier minimap and the one from later patches:

Earlier:

Later:

[induktio]

What versions are you referring to with those earlier patches? Thinker does not include any changes on this specific part of the user interface so it is just the original version. The first image seems to have some kind of dithering so not really sure if that would be preferable. Anyway to modify that feature we would need to rewrite the rendering for minimap and currently the codebase does not include those functions.

[jez9999]

It's release 4.0. It may be dithered but I still think it looks a lot nicer than the later one with "blobs with inconsistent borders" for bases.

[induktio]

Does that mean "Earlier" image is taken from 4.0 and "Later" image is from the latest release or something else? Not sure what might be happening there since the mod should not directly affect this part of the game, maybe there could be indirect effects from somewhere else. How does the minimap look like if you open the savegame using the original binary with no patches installed?

[jez9999]

Hmm, maybe I'm confused about what counts as a later patch then but what caused the display screw-up was when I installed SMAC_Patch_v1.03f.exe (the Fixaris 'Win2000/XP update') which I assumed was a more recent version than 4.0 but maybe it's just a "different" version. That said, it looks like something the GOG version has had applied to it if you look at one of their screenshots:

Maybe someone who owns the GOG version could confirm what the minimap looks like on a fresh install of that.

[induktio]

Maybe should have been more specific since was only referring to Thinker versions above. Thinker will only run with SMACX official version 2.0 so I assumed you were using it for both screenshots. So if the original game made changes on the minimap between official versions, not really sure what those changes might include since the development focuses only on the latest official version. If the minimap otherwise works okay, probably I will not plan any changes on it and besides that it might require significant additional rewrites on the game engine.

[jez9999]

Could you give a screenshot of what the latest official version's minimap actually looks like (with a bunch of bases built)? I run my older version because I like the look of the minimap and I assumed the latest version had that rendering but now I'm not sure.

[induktio]

Hmm, accidentally mistyped the versions there since I was referring to the latest Thinker version 5.3. That "Later" image also looks like pretty similar to the latest official version 2.0 for SMACX which is fine. I do not remember seeing that dithered "Earlier" version with any latest official version installed. If you have any issues installing the latest patches can also try installing GOG version since it has those patches bundled. That is also the baseline for mod development so if you can get it to display similarly to the "Later" version then this is probably okay as things are.

[jez9999]

Yeah I don't have the GOG version which is why I was hoping you or someone could provide a screenshot of what its map looks like. I hate the look of the "Later" version.

[induktio]

There is an example of minimap on the original game SMACX v2.0.

[jez9999]

Yeah, looks horrible. I guess my request is that you find the code for the old map rendering and allow it to be used again. I can supply terran.exe that renders the old map style if you want. I have no idea why they changed it to look like that but it seems to be doing some kind of image resizing to make the map smaller with no interpolation. Also, how do Spartan bases get red pixels in their borders? lol

[induktio]

Modifying that might not be simple since currently the mod does not rewrite much of the rendering code. It is very time consuming to modify these since we don't have the original sources but it is also possible there are some shortcuts to this but haven't studied that part of the code in detail. Something like this could be part of a larger graphics overhaul but currently it is not specifically planned.

[jez9999]

I'm somewhat amazed I'm the only person I've noticed that has a problem with the fugly minimap with blobs for bases that have inconsistent borders. :-) The rest of the SMAC UI might not exactly be pretty, but it's not that bad. IMHO the minimap being rendered like that just looks like some beta unfinished version.