yo this is too rad. Just imagine if it were a client-sided add-on that gave you a map of the server in real time. Too bad that's next to impossible.
its not really that impossible - if you had a script log newly created bricks and fed them into a live-running minimap maker, the time it would take to update only the relevant chunks of the map should be pretty fast.
There is no need to generate the image externally if you tell Blockland to render orthographically. Surprisingly, orthographic rendering is as simple as a few memory edits and requires no DLL:
(default lighting)Shadows are trickier because the frustums need to be adjusted to force highest quality resolution, not impossible with patching but much easier with a DLL:
(shadows)The disadvantage of using real-time graphics for this is limited resolution, although it's the closest an in-game representation will look like. Ray tracing is better overall for customization but I think it's dumb to reinvent the wheel when extremely powerful and configurable renderers exist (Blender cycles). It's smarter to write a proper blb/bls importer and then let Blender do the heavy lifting. (something something abstraction)
