Godot: Scene minimap for 2D editor

[eon-s]

A minimap for 2D editor could be really useful for games with big levels.

This is the way it is on Tiled:

But on Godot it will need to be configurable on extents and zoom, not limited to tilemaps (because is just one of many ways to make levels).

Could look like this:

Or use the bottom panel to make it less intrusive and allow minimaps for huge levels,

This may be possible to do with plugins but I'm not good with viewports (and failed miserably trying :sweat_smile: ) so I can't be sure.

[Zylann]

I personally never needed such a feature, zooming out generally does the job. If this gets in it should be togglable in Editor Settings.
Also, beware of performance when you have one viewport rendering a part of a level + another rendering the whole world at the same time^^

[Zireael07]

+1 for this being toggleable.

[kubecz3k]

I'm not sure but for me this one looks like a perfect candidate for plugin, not the core. (It should easy to write such plugin, assuming we would be able to fetch editor viewport from the plugin)

[kubecz3k]

You would need basically to just Viewport.get_texture() and then apply this texture to Sprite

[Zylann]

If I were to make a minimap, I would first assume that the map is huge enough to need such a map. Which means I would not use a viewport because rendering huge scenes is costy. Instead, I would associate a color to each tile / grid location in the scene, and plot one pixel inside a minimap texture. Less accurate than an actual render, but a lot cheaper :D Then it can stay in sync with a basic rolling update. Or it can be a mix of viewport tiled rendering (rendering small sections of world frame by frame to compose a larger map). That could also be useful in 3D scenes. Just throwing ideas^^ (now I want to try that xD)

[eon-s]

Like a minitilemap @Zylann ?
It will need some extra visual objects, not just tiles, can use a setup of special groups to identify the nodes it need to draw (like a pixel for characters, non-tile obstacles).

That should be enough for a level designer, which need mostly to see the layout more than the detailed elements.

[Zylann]

Tiles would be the base of the thing, if the user needs special markers it can be added on top of it

[akien-mga]

Feature and improvement proposals for the Godot Engine are now being discussed and reviewed in a dedicated Godot Improvement Proposals (GIP) (godotengine/godot-proposals) issue tracker. The GIP tracker has a detailed issue template designed so that proposals include all the relevant information to start a productive discussion and help the community assess the validity of the proposal for the engine.

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