Hey guys. I was wondering if there was a way to block the minimap so that people cannot look at the minimap and see units that are under trees or behind buildings (things like that). Like if you've played the "Hide n Seek" map where there are a bunch of trees. People can see you on the minimap if you are not cloaked under the tree. Is there a way to make it so that people cannot see the minimap? Thanks for the help in advance!
~Mouse

I don't know of elegant ways, however you can try this overflow: Minimap Freeze

Poor outlook for multiplayer games, but it may be worth a shot

I already tried this actually, and for some reason it is not working ;/

You can force players to disable viewing the terrain via EUD. That's the best I can think of.

You could spam burrowed, visible units under the trees, it might make it so you can't tell when other units moved there because the minimap is always displaying the dots for the burrowed units.

The best way is to have the player color the same as the minimap color. This can be achieved with brown on a desert map with certain tiles. I'm sure you can blend brown in with other colors, and other colors with other colors too.

Kakarus as neutral will be light blue, and you can set the player to that same color. Placing other critters and other small things around the map of the same color might help too.

Basically you have to hide the players' color in with a lot of other things the player won't care about seeing in the minimap, be it terrain or neutral units, or static structures... Anything really.

The thing to be careful of with this is the fact that people can switch the minimap to display allies as yellow and enemies as red. It can be used to bypass measures like this, although I'd assume there is an EUD which can detect if someone does this, in which case it's possible to stop.

That doesn't freeze the unit dots.

Yeah, this is really the most sure-fire way if it's an option. Here's some useful information that may help if you want to use the above strategy:

When two units are at the same location on the minimap (e.g., a Scourge above a Zergling), the minimap has to resolve it to only one color at that location, so it has a pecking order. It goes like so:

1. Current Player
2. Player 1
3. Player 2
4. Player 3
...
13. Player 12

This means if Player 3 and Player 5 had a unit at the same location, everyone would see Player 3's color (teal by default, except Player 3 who would see lime green) on the minimap except Player 5, who would see Current Player's color (lime green).

Now, how is that useful? Well, simply put, if you covered the entire map with units owned by Player 1, everyone would see that color on the minimap unless they had a unit there. So if you set Player 1's color to black, the minimap would always be black for all players, except for where their own units are (similar to when you toggle viewing the terrain by hitting the tab key).

I used the above concept for a minimap stats section used by multiple players. On null tiles, Player 1 (black) was a computer with units that covered a bunch of "8" shapes (like a digital clock), and each player had their own set of units (initially owned by some different computer player). Since they didn't own any units, the minimap appeared to be black. But then I could give units in a "5" shape from Player 9 to Player 2, and suddenly, Player 2 would see a green "5" on the minimap. Since Player 1 takes priority over other players (excluding Current), the other players still don't see anything on their minimap.

Maybe I should make a Theories topic on the idea... But anyway, if you wanted to truly block out visibility of other players' units on the minimap, cover the area with visible units owned by Player 1 (and yes, it can be any color you like).

I think I will try to use Cecil's option because I need to be able to build (With a Probe). So I'll see how that goes. I will be back!

Edit: I also have a way to stop the person from switching minimap views.

Edit 2: Cool, Cecil's idea worked great and I have some EUDs to detect if you switched the minimap screen to see allies/enemies and now it makes your screen move all around the map based on observers owned by a computer so you cannot see it. It also creates 255 battlecruisers and removes them rapidly so he cannot see.

Post has been edited 2 time(s), last time on Apr 25 2012, 3:56 pm by Mouse.

You can scramble the minimap by using some non standard map seizes in the Y dimension.

Yeah, but then that would also still screw up the terrain making the game kinda pointless..

It wont scramble the terrain, it will only add or subtract a few columns of tile. If you don't want to make the new area playable you can put cliffs there.

It is all based off of tree doodads and grass that is rectangular, so Idk how that would work with making cliffs. That would completely screw up my terrain lol.