Powerup and Pedestrian mapper [remade!]

[Espyo]

UPDATE (31 Mar 2013)

gunna35 created a PHP version of the powerup and pedestrian mapper. So yeah, forget my project, and go check his application, now! It has everything you need (except cops, at the time of writing this), but you'll need a web server that can parse PHP to run it. (link to this post).

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On this topic, I brought up the idea of creating a program that can map the location of all powerups. Some days later, I made a quick protoype and decided I should crate a dedicated thread for it.

This thread will cover two programs: the powerup mapper and the pedestrian mapper.

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UPDATE (12 Jan 2013)

I'm afraid to say I've reached a complete and utter dead-end some days ago. I have absolutely no idea why some transformation matrices don't match up. In simpler talk: The program is fine, but somehow some levels's maps are good, others have the powerups out of bounds, off-scale, etc.

I have no idea how to fix it, except by brute-forcing fixes for every map that doesn't work correctly. This means tweaking the scale, rotation and translation individually, over and over, getting ever closer to a result that KINDA looks like an actual map. For every single level that doesn't work. For some, it looks like it's just a simple 180º rotation or so, but for others it's complete chaos. I have no time for this, and frankly, the interest in the whole project isn't too great.

However, if anyone has some free time, and knows how to program in C++ and Allegro (Allegro shouldn't be complicated to figure out, and it plays a relatively minor role here anyway), you can just pick up the source code from the following link, which is also the closest thing to a "final" release I'll have, for the time being. https://my.pcloud.com/publink/show?code=XZt5jqZqsMubo1O44JkCuuFibmzM4n2CJok If you need help with anything regarding the program, throw me a PM, a reply on this topic, an e-mail, anything. I'll be glad to help.

In addition, if you still wanna get a custom map for one of the levels that do work, contact me. The program is up, and I have the map image files, so it's not a bother to create a powerup map.

Levels that work:

• Bleak City Business District (Maim Street, Wall Street Crash)


• Bleak City Commercial District... probably (Mangled at the Mall, High Rise Horror, Downtown Devastation


• Bleak City Outskirts (Avenue of Atrocities, Top Gear Thrash, Blood on the Rooftops)


• Dusty Trails Scenic Coastal Drive (Coastal Carnage, Hitch Hiker Harvest, Beef Curtains)


• Devil's Canyon Mining Town (Death Valley, Erasing Arizona, Roswell That Ends Well, Desert Storm)


• Devil's Canyon Mines Complex... needs an 180º flip. It's easy to do manually but a bit cumbersome... (Pit Stop, 600ft Under, Halfway to Hell, Shafts of Fright, Mine's a Large One)

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POWERUP MAPPER

So far, I have a brief prototype, and this is the result for Maim Street (supposedly?):


This is the result of a quick read of a the file of an iOS version's map, and a mapping of the corresponding powerups.

There's only one problem, which we can all see. Actually, there are several problems, but I'll explain those in a sec. You see, there are a lot of powerups, but they don't seem right at all. Is there a section on Maim Street with what seems to be fifty mines all bundled together? That's not even my biggest concern - the fact that the resulting image is less wide than it is high. The maps are the other way around. Other than that, I'll have to figure out the exact scale and the exact positioning. But yeah, this is pretty good so far, don't you think?

Now, questions you might have:

• I can't see where the powerups are; the background is transparent!
  
  Don't worry, the image is meant to be overlayed on top of the map. I plan on making some neat Javascript things for the wiki using this fact.


• There are too many things, I can't find the powerup I'm looking for!
  
  Don't worry, I made it so it's easy to change what powerups appear and don't appear with a simple text file. I'll probably make two versions of the maps, one with all powerups, another with only the best ones.


• Some icons overlap others and are too bundled together!
  
  Don't worry, I made it so it's easy to set the zoom.

Oh, there's another thing... The icons. They're tiny. The icons are 8x8; I made an icon sheet in Paint.NET, with all of them pixelated, and tried to make them the most identifiable possible. Then I upgraded it in Inkscape (which are the icons you see on that image). You can understand some of them right away (specially if you know the original icons) like Hot Rod a bit below the middle there. But some will be hard to understand anyway... I'll possibly add a legend at some point in the future, for those really-hard-to-understand ones. Or I could make the "best powerups" map use larger versions of the icons; I've made it so the size of each icon can be customized independently. But yeah, tell me what you think about the current icons.

Anyway, I plan on making several image files, incorporate them into the wiki in some nice boxes where you can do stuff with some buttons, and I plan to release the executable and source code, if you want to create your own custom maps.

One final thing, I think. I'm using the original Carmageddon's map graphics. It looks like it makes no difference, but if you see something off with a map, that might be it.

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PEDESTRIAN MAPPER

Not done yet...

Planned features:

• Creation of a map with all pedestrians shown as dots.


• Creation of a layer that shows the most populated spots.

PS: This thread is in the Carmageddon board, instead of the iOS board, because I plan on also having this for the original game too. I'm even considering the Splat Pack and Carmageddon II as well!

[Espyo]

Update!


(Right-click -> View Image, to see it in its full glory.)

What we have here is a near-perfect representation of all the powerups in Maim Street!

The only difference between this and the one on the OP is that this one swapped the X and Z coordinates. Silly Stainless, considering the Z coordinate left and right... Oh, also I used LEVEL1.TXT this time, as opposed to LEVEL.TXT; the difference seems to be the extra Peds Show on Map, 2nd-to-last rooftop from the Southernmost row of buildings.

Now, there is one tiny problem... Which is roughly beyond my control. If you look closely at the top-right bundle of powerups, at the Southernmost part of the nearly-triangular building, there is an Instant Handbrake, 5 Free Recovery Vouchers, and a Credits powerup type 2 (larger amount). To the right of that, on the sidewalk, is an Instant Repairs powerup. Now, that Instant Repair is meant to be on the sidewalk, not in the middle of the bloody road!

However, if I drag the powerups any more to the right, the Credits type 2 icon will go into the sidewalk!

This leads me to conclude that the maps are a bit wonky. So... this is as best as you can get.

But it doesn't matter, does it? You can still see everything fine! And if you go to the area of a powerup and can't find it at sidewalk level, well, I guess it's brutally obvious that it's actually on a rooftop. ...Or an opponent might've grabbed it. Luckily it's easy to spot exactly where they are for most of them.

Oh, and that's the huge bundle mapping. Of course this makes it hard to find (and identify!) the best powerups. But like I said, I will also generate a set of maps that only have the best powerups, and with decently-sized icons this time!

But for now, I'm off to make this work with the other maps.

Please PLEASE let the other maps use the same scale and offset as this one...

[C2 Scientist]

Nice work so far! There are a few powerups I haven't ever collected, such as the gas station roof ones, the rooftop powerups in a straight line northeast of the stadium, and the lone bright yellow powerup in the courtyard in the south (actually I thought this courtyard was empty every time I visited it? No matter).

Are you going to use various differently coloured simple icon types, such as red/yellow/orange/green/etc dot/circle/square/hyphen/slash/star/triangle/etc?

[Espyo]

Well, the icons are already colored as they are in game, but the shapes... It's hard to have those little icons look small but still understandable, and diamonds and circles aren't exactly space-effective. So I'm guessing I'll stick with the squares for now. But like I said, I made it so the icon graphics can be easily changed, so if later on, anyone who's a better artist than I am wants to try to make better icons, it'd be great!

[C2 Scientist]

I agree that if you want to keep the icon sizes very small, it might prove difficult to make out the miniscule differences in some of the almost identical powerup icons - such as "Frozen opponents" and "Frozen cops". But of course, if you want to differentiate only a select few of all existing powerups (lumping the uninteresting ones together), simple multicolored squares should do just fine.

[Toshiba-3]

Nice work Espyo!

What about hosting a google maps based site with all the maps and the powerups location (and even more?).

You'd be able to zoom and stuff.

[Espyo]

I'd need to learn the API and such. That might be a good exercise for later on, but right now, I'm gonna focus on the basics.

[shane]

Looking good Espyo!

Something like this would be pretty sweet with the ability to turn off certain power-ups: http://www.aionarmory.com/location.aspx?id=3

[Espyo]

That's so neat! Gah, actually starting to feel low for having trouble doing this simple program, when I should ideally be almost finishing something awesome like that.

I blame the transformation matrix; I think it's a bit wrong.

[Harmalarm]

Hey great work Espyo! This gives great insight

Yes the transformation matrices area very confusing when it comes to the map views. What it represents is the 3d world, transformed in such a way that it fits in projectionspace of the camera on a 640x480 resolution (maybe even half for c1). This sounds real cool but I understand the fuck of it... :( I did write some notes about it. It might help you, it might not. Anyway, here it is; https://harm.cwaboard.co.uk/files/minimapinfo.txt

[Espyo]

I think that's really gonna help me! Thanks!

I actually have the translation matrix figured out, the outcome is just slightly wrong. But I'm gonna make some more experiments, read that, and hopefully, we'll have something good to go in no time!

Oh, and while we wait, here's something I did before I took the translation matrix path, i.e. when I figured out the scale and translation manually for Maim Street:


(Again, right-click, view image)

Personally it looks like the best balance between icon size and map size. Anyone who knows the basic icons will immediately get what icon means what, I hope!

[DJK]

This is looking pretty good :) looking forward to the "finished" result :)

[Espyo]

Update! I finally got the transformation matrix to work perfectly.

The translations and rotations are exactly the ones provided in the game's files, but the scale... I had to use the one on the files, but multiplied by a value I found manually. And if there's something interfering with automatic coordinates that needs to be hand-made... that's no good. Something could easily break at any second.

Luckily, the multiplier is the same for all maps, as far as I can tell, which means the mapper now works for all CarmaiOS maps... probably.

Tomorrow I'll work on making sure this is true, as well as fine-tune some other things. In the meantime, here's an update screenshot:


(As per usual, right-click, view image)

I think those powerups are in the right place. However, there's a bonus this time!... See that in the middle? That's right, I've also mapped the cops' positions! ...I just don't think that's right, because I honestly doubt they're all packed together like that. In addition, I still need to check which way they're facing in-game. Finally, if you look closely, the arrows for the cops break the transparency a bit. There is nothing I can do to fix this, it's a limitation with Allegro's memory bitmaps. I can manually export everything layer by layer, then paste it together, which is what I've been doing so far, but for now, this works fine.

[lemonrev]

Espyo, Really fantastic to see your still working on these maps and data your pulling from the game files.. How many layers are you having to put togeather and are they comming from the one file ?.

Too see the maps filled with everything almost there and all the extra powerups rock. I do like these small updates keep up the good work. and dont over work :P, not good for brain to get over run with idears :).... Anyways Thanks for another great track with everything there :).

[Espyo]

Thanks! By layers, I just meant each of the mappings. So one layer for the background while zoomed, another for the powerups, another for the cops, and another for the peds (when I take care of them). Oh, almost forgot, and another layer for something I have in mind: a mapping of the most ped-populated areas. There's a name for what I mean, but when I show it in action, everyone will get it.

And if I'm having fun doing it, does it still count as over-work? :D

[lemonrev]

espyo, sounds kewl well you might have to do different maps for peds vs the things on track as i know peds can be in hard to reach places and just having them on map could be even more confusing if you put everything on the map at once :).

And if you enjoy putting these together then please keep it up and i dont think its called over work if you enjoy it too much :P

[Espyo]

It pains me to say that I'm giving up on this project. At least for now. I explain why in detail on an edit in the first post, but basically: I have NO idea how to fix the levels that give wrong maps. So before the project goes into complete obscurity, I decided to release the source code and a pseudo-release.

[DJK]

:( sad to hear... Was looking forward to this !

[gunna35]

I decided to take a look into this to see if I could make any progress on Espyo's excellent work. Basically what I ended up doing was rewriting the mapper as a web application.

I've fixed the rotation issue with the powerup location plotting, and I have the pedestrian mapping working. Neither Espyo or myself have managed to plot the cop locations accurately though. The app contains a race selection, zoom selection, and individual filters for each different powerup.

Please give it a go and let me know of any issues that come up.

http://carmaplot.libjam.com/

[Espyo]

As per the PMs we exchanged, awesome job! Me and him are still trying to figure out what's up with the cops' coordinates, so keep your eyes wide open on the next few days!

[lemonrev]

gunna35 awsum job man, once you have other people looking into this and your prog maybe you can get someone to make an app ie maybe for iphone / android stuff ?. or just plan pc :). when you think its polished enough.

I personally dont mind that it doesnt have the cops but dang good job..

Espyo, You too man. thanks for all your help in this as well as you made a huge jump in defineing how all this worked. :).

GOOD job community :P..

[shane]

Excellent job! Looks like a lot of work's gone into this!

[gunna35]

Hi all.

Thanks for the support, but in all honesty pretty much all the work was done by Espyo. Effectively I just took what he had built and rewrote it into a format that was more readily accessible that allowed for all of the mapped data to be displayed at once, but with filters that could be used in realtime. Apart from this I just fixed the rotation issues and finished the mapping.

I would like to proudly say I finally got the cop locations working this afternoon and have replaced the maps that had course outlines still on them with blank maps.

I'm looking into a few smaller tweaks to it, but at this point I believe it is complete.

[DJK]

Please release this if it is complete :)

[Espyo]

It was kinda "completed" already. Check the topmost update on the first post for more information. It's not a program now, but a handy web page.