Wow! Awesome work. The 3D models are phenomenal. The gameplay reminds me of Crazy Taxi a bit but with a more physics based driving system (I mean that in a good way). Did you use a pathfinding algorithm for the mini map? Great work!
Thank you! Credit for the 3D models goes to Kay Lousberg. The mini map uses a simple A* pathfinding algorithm. It was pretty quick and easy to implement since the city is randomly generated on a grid. If you know the A* algorithm it's pretty quick to implement. Especially on a simple square grid with only 4 possible directions to move. If you don't know the algorithm I can highly learning about it as it can come in handy very often.
To display it as a mini map I simply draw the grid into a small texture where each pixel is one square in the grid. Like this Then I use bilinear filtering and some shader magic to make it look a bit more "round".
Sorry I got a bit carried away explaining everything, but maybe it's interesting for you or someone else.
269 days ago(+1)
Very cool, thank you for explaining. I'm relatively new to the world of programming, and don't know how to use many data structures beyond arrays, lists, and hashmaps, but I've been trying to experiment more with Linked Lists, Graphs, and Trees recently. I'm familiar with A* and I implemented it into a small top down fighting game I was working on, but I (sort of) cheated and used a Unity package to make it easy on myself. I think I need to experiment more with BFS and DFS before diving into the more complicated algos. Really cool though. Nice work, once again.