In modded play (Gondola, mostly) I've grown quite fond of using the Automap for keeping track of my position, as well as briefly tracking other important pieces of map-level information. Vanilla in comparison has little if anything to display to the player, when it could potentially be adding much more.



Below are a list of my suggested additions to the automap, starting with ones that I think are pivotal to improving gameplay experience and ending on ones that are more wishlist additions, or those with more questionable gameplay effect:

-Stationary markers for Objective Gamemodes, like Flag Spawners (CTF), Helmet Spawners (Skulltag) and Point Totems (Skulltag)

- Markers for Weapon Tokens (all modes).

- A marker that replaces the Player Arrows that represent you and your teammates in play, or all players while spectating

-- Some indicator of their facing direction.

- Markers that indicate dropped or freshly spawned Objectives, including Flags, Helmets, the Circuit Board, the Terminator Pickup.

- Markers that indicate Objectives in Motion, including Flags, Helmets, the Circuit Board, the Terminator Pickup.

- Markers that indicate Large Health/Ammo Pickup locations, regardless of whether they are currently on respawn or not.

Personally I would be content with just the top three, but I figured I would list more in case there was desire for the rest. Some of these could be linked to server variables if needed? Thanks for any consideration.

I've long since wanted and pushed for more automap usage in stuff I make so I'm in support of utilizing it more.

I know part of the reason we historically haven't is so that mods can use whatever behavior they want, but I'm not sure what the team's general opinion on it is nowadays.

As the person who implemented this initially for Gondola, I definitely would be interested in having a similar feature carry over. Regarding weapons, however, the concern was that it'd require modders (and ourselves) to implement an extra actor and graphic for every weapon that we make.

Reason being, Zandronum doesn't have the feature to allow us to transfer the sprite from one actor to another. Even if it did, we'd still probably want to use a separate graphic that's offsetted differently, since using the current weapon icon's offsets causes a weird swivel effect as you rotate the automap.

I'm also not sure if automap icons for the circuit board and terminator sphere pickups would be the most fitting for those game modes since they don't use the radar like CTF and Skulltag. While those modes were still getting overhauled in V6B, we toyed with the idea of having a "proximity" radar instead of the typical CTF radar, but I'm not sure if there'd be a way to reflect that mechanic on the automap.