Tile game? Maping...

[ElevenToes]

I have a large tile map that you can only
see a small portion of so, I need one of
those little maps that you see in games.
The one that shows a shrunken picture
of the whole world.

I have a backbuffer of the entire map without
the players on it so if some how I could
shrink that ????

Hope someone can help....

Thanks

[kedaman]

what api's do you use to visualize the map?
I wouldn't recommend to store the entire map in a backbuffer, especially for large maps.

[Sastraxi]

Stretchblt API!!!

It's similar to bitblt API but you can change the size in the blitting.
Or you could assign a colour to all of the units and map tiles and then just do it like that.
This is for a Minimap, right?

[ElevenToes]

Thanks Sastraxi that works

Kedman I am putting large maps into a backbuffer.
What do you recommend? My intention is to make this
an interactive network game. So, I have multiple
players adjusting multiple things all over the map.

[kedaman]

How large is the bitmap and what color resolution?
If you have a tile based map i suggest you create a 8 bit bitmap from the array you use as map, and assign the palette the colors you need for each specific tile. Then you could further plot overlaying structures/units on it. If the map is static during most of the time, you could generate the bitmap each time it's changed and add the overlaying pixels in another backbuffer.

regarding the bigger map, you should only keep a backbuffer of what currently fits into the screen, and then update it as you scroll or tiles changes.