It's been a while ... SCS Minimapper!
Last time my blog/site has gone without a post for several weeks, I was immersed in learning to program in Qt. There’s been a gap of over two weeks again, so that might mean I’m immersed in some other project. And yes, that’s indeed the case!
I’ve made minimap programs for five citybuilding games now (Caesar 3 and 4, Pharaoh, Zeus, Emperor), and they’ve been most heavily used on the result pages of a contest site I’ve helped with. This same site is now hosting contests for Tilted Mill’s new game, SimCity Societies.
The minimap images from the in-game screenshots are so tiny that they are quite unsuitable for display on the results pages. So, a couple of weeks ago, I received an IM from the administrator, basically begging me to write a minimapper for it, even though I don’t have the game itself.
After two weeks of puzzling, with virtually no support from the developers besides a “maybe, we’ve forwarded your request for information to the publisher, but information regarding the file format will have to pass by a zillion lawyers”, and just a few saved games to get by, I figured out most of the file format. At least enough to do a decent job at creating images from saved games.
The job was considerably easier than usual because the game itself already creates two images which, combined, are the minimap, so I had a perfect example to work from. The most difficult part was reproducing this image when the two images were not available. Though it’s of lesser quality, all buildings are still visible on it.
Anyway, to cut a long story short, version 1.0 of the SCS Minimapper is available from the downloads!