HOW-TO: Generate minimaps

Minimaps are made out of tile images with each image being a screenshot which represents a tile of the world from a bird's-eye view.

The whole process of making very detailed and accurate minimaps can be challenging. There is a lot of external adjustments you need to do with the raw generated images.

Minimaps are generally divided into:

• exteriors (water, roads, terrain, forest)

• interiors (buildings, caves).

Below you can find out how to work with both.

Minimap for exteriors

In high level, the original flow was the following:

1. Take screenshots with specific rendering settings of the world map in editor with everything streamed in for given chunk and spit out various layers of data (colour, normals, water mask, roads mask, buildings mask, etc.).

2. Take these images and merge into big images of the entire world for each layer.

3. Pass them through Photoshop saved actions batch that processes all layers and merges them into single final image, adding clouds.

4. Split the final image into original chunks (size).

5. Remove the chunks that were not used by game (the actual terrain is way bigger than the UI map that can be observed in the game).

6. Generate lower LOD for each chunk (downscale).

7. Save in the final destination in the W3 content folder.

So if you are someone who is familiar with using photoshop, you could do some post editions what you see fit. If you are not that’s not a problem, we will only talk about the most necessary steps to provide something visible on the minimaps and skip adding the fancy stuff for now.

You can find all the minimaps already generated for vanilla maps located in …\depot\gameplay\gui_new\minimaps\

Each folder is named after a world. In each folder you’ll see all the tile images that are used up for making a two dimensional grid using an X and Y coordinate. Each image follows a naming convention as follows:

<tile_name_prefix><X_coordinate>x<Y_coordinate>.<image_format>

e.g. tile12x13.jpg

Navigate to \depot\gameplay\gui_new\actionscript\red\game\witcher3\hud\modules\minimap2\ and open the actionscript file called HubMapContainer.as. In it there is a function called GetTileFilename at line 236. Here you can see how tiles are accessed.

return "img://minimaps/" + HudModuleMinimap2.m_worldName + "/tile" + tileX + "x" + tileY + "." + HudModuleMinimap2.m_tileExteriorTextureExtension;