Tanki MapViewer

[ThirdOnion 4,898]

MAPVIEWER

 

 

What is MapViewer?
 
MapViewer is a program I've created for well, viewing Tanki maps, with a focus on graphics quality and streamlined use. Think of it as an upgraded Tanks Testing Tool, minus the tanks.
 
Features:

• Graphics comparable to the official game, with dynamic shadows, lighting, and fog.
• Fifteen different skyboxes with different lighting settings - two daytime modes, a winter mode, and four nighttime modes.
• A custom library that enables mapmakers to place lights on their maps.
• Support for 1.x, 3.x, and official maps.
• Streamlined UI that allows for easy map loading, skybox changes, and graphics settings adjustments.
• Includes all of the official Tanki proplibs, with support for custom proplibs.

MapViewer is made in Unity.
 
Download MapViewer v0.1.1 (~78 MB ZIP, ~147 MB unpacked):

https://www.dropbox.com/s/nb3o2a61cwvzjk9/MapViewer_v0.1.1.zip?dl=0

Don't have any of your own maps to view? Download the official Tanki maps here:

http://en.tankiforum.com/index.php?showtopic=381585
 
IMPORTANT 
In order for your maps to work properly with MapViewer, they need to be created using the Official Libraries. Maps created with the libraries included in MDK or TLVK may load, but could be missing some props.
 
QUICK START

Once you've downloaded MapViewer_v0.1.zip, unzip it to wherever you like. This will be the resulting file structure:

To launch the application, open MapViewer.exe. Upon launch, you will be greeted with an empty view of a skybox. To open the main menu panel, press the "Tab" key.

 

 

 

Select the open file button, choose your map file, and if all goes well, your map should load. Close the main panel by pressing "Tab" again to enable movement around the map.
 
NAVIGATION

Move the camera with the WASD and QE keys, and look around with the arrow keys. Click (without dragging) to toggle mouse look. Hold shift for faster movement.
 
SKYBOX
To change the skybox, open the main panel, and select the skybox icon. You will be presented with a list of skyboxes to choose from.

Note that different skyboxes have different lighting settings. Here is a map with several different skyboxes:

To close any panel, simply click somewhere in the empty space around the panel. 

IMPORTANT

Maps made with winter props will look "burnt out" under daytime skyboxes, because winter props are predominately white and reflect more light. Use the winter skybox or a night skybox to avoid this.

Top - winter skybox. Bottom - summer skybox.

LIGHTING
MapViewer allows mapmakers to create lights within their maps. They can be used to light billboards at night . . .

. . . illumine underground areas . . .

. . . or have screen props actually emit light.

 
The lighting workflow is as such:

1. First, find the "PointLight" folder in your MapViewer folder. Load it into AlternativaEditor as you would any library.

2. The PointLight library contains a "light cube." Place light cubes on your map wherever you want a light emitted uniformly in all directions. In MapViewer, these light cubes will be converted into point lights. To change the color of a light, change the texture of a light cube. Blue light cubes will become blue lights, red light cubes red lights, etc.

Example use of a red point light cube in AlternativaEditor.

3. Save your map and load it into MapViewer. 

 

The same map in MapViewer.

IMPORTANT

In order for lights to be visible, Lights must be enabled in settings! In addition, for accurate shadows, the Deferred rendering path must be selected. More information on this is below. 

Point lights are resource intensive! Use them sparingly, as having too many may cause serious FPS drops.
 
SETTINGS

IMPORTANT

MapViewer will automatically apply and save your settings as soon as you change them. In order to reset your settings to the default values, or to remove every trace of this program from your PC, open regedit and navigate to HKEY_CURRENT_USER > Software > MappingTools. Then just delete the entire MappingTools folder.

Although MapViewer has no explicit option for fullscreen / windowed mode, you can toggle fullscreen by using the Alt-Enter shortcut.

Shadows - set the quality of shadows, or disable them. Note that up close, the difference between high and low quality shadows is less noticeable than it is from afar. Default: low.

 

Top - shadows off. Bottom - shadows set to high quality.

Lights - disable or enable point lights in the map. If you are viewing a map during the day, it is recommended to disable point lights, since they aren't very noticeable in the sun. Default: off.

 

Top - lights off. Bottom - lights on.

 

Render path - Choose between forward and deferred. Default: forward.

What's the difference between forward and deferred rendering, and which one should I use?

Short answer: Use deferred rendering ONLY if your map has point lights and you want accurate shadows, and ONLY if the Lights settings is enabled. Use forward rendering otherwise, as it offers significantly better performance.

Top - forward rendering. Bottom- deferred rendering.

Long answer:

 

Without going into the details of how each path works, forward rendering is faster and supports fog and anti-aliasing, but has a limit on how many lights it can accurately render. Deferred rendering, on the other hand, can render many lights accurately, but has a higher performance overhead, does not support certain features such as fog and anti-aliasing, and is not supported on some hardware.

Maps that do not have point lights have only one light source - a single directional light that represents the light coming from the sun (or moon). In this situation, forward rendering is the optimal choice since only a single light needs to be rendered, and the renderer can handle it. However, once more lights are introduced into the equation, forward rendering becomes sub-optimal since the more lights there are added to a map, the less accurately they will be rendered as the forward renderer cannot do accurate lighting calculations for all of them. Furthermore forward rendering does not render shadows from point lights - which results in light "bleeding" out from behind walls.

 

Because of the way deferred rendering works, it can accurately render many lights - at the cost of certain features, and most importantly, performance. It is pointless to use deferred rendering with maps that do not have any point lights - that is, they only have the one directional light - because the forward renderer is faster and can render a single light without any issues. Thus, deferred rendering should only be used when there are multiple lights on a map and if your machine can handle it.

 

You can learn more about rendering paths in Unity here.

 

Fog - toggle fog. Default: on.

Top - fog off. Bottom - fog on.

Anti-aliasing - toggle anti-aliasing and set its quality. Default: off. More info: https://www.gamespot.com/gallery/pc-graphics-settings-explained-anti-aliasing-v-syn/2900-1100/

Anisotropic filtering - toggle anisotropic filtering. Default: off. See above link.

V-sync - toggle v-sync. Limits your framerate to your monitor refresh rate in order to reduce screen-tearing. Enabling this setting is recommended, but by default it is disabled. See above link.

Show FPS - show or hide the FPS counter in the top right hand corner. Default: off.

Sprites - toggle sprites on the map. Default: on

Top - sprites off. Bottom - sprites on.

Camera look speed - affects the speed of both arrow key and mouse look sensitivity when viewing maps. Default: right in the middle.

INFO PANEL

A new info panel has been added in version 0.1.1. It shows the number of props, sprites, and lights in a map.

 

 

 

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
MapViewer uses the excellent Simple File Browser by yasirkula: https://forum.unity.com/threads/simple-file-browser-open-source.441908/
 
LEGACY DOWNLOADS

 

Version 0.1:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/we81sicewm9r6ht/MapViewer_v0.1.zip?dl=0

 SCREENSHOTS

 

https://imgur.com/a/G4rMxiW

 

Most of the screenshots in this thread are of official maps, because I'm not much of a mapmaker and didn't bother making any specifically to show off MapViewer. However, if you would like have a screenshot of YOUR map featured, PM me and I will add your screenshot to the topic and credit you accordingly.
 
Please report any bugs and problems, and leave your feedback, suggestions, etc. MapViewer is an ongoing project.

Edited June 12, 2020 by ThirdOnion
Corrected link

[Guest]

CUSTOM LIBRARIES

Coming soon

Edited July 19, 2019 by ThirdOnion

[Initiate 1,306]

Nice job! :)

[Guest]

MapViewer has been updated to version 0.1.1. In this release:

• Significant performance improvements were made. On my PC, FPS has increased by about 60%.
• Some incorrect textures were fixed.
• An issue where maps with spawn points or bonus regions would not load was fixed.
• A new information panel was added.

The new version can be downloaded here or through the main topic, which has been updated.

 

 

 

https://imgur.com/a/WIpx6iQ

 

 

 

EDIT: Unwittingly a bug found its way into this release. I have fixed it and updated the program, but if you have downloaded v0.1.1 before the time of this edit, some large maps may be missing some props. You can re-download MapViewer to fix this.

Edited July 21, 2019 by ThirdOnion

[Michael828 816]

You deserve a lot more recognition for this, it looks just like the works of a professional, well done!

[wild001 786]

excellent work,

 

good to see more pro user on the fun art part.

 

it will be cool to add those tank as decoration as well, even though no need to move, just placing a army of tanks in the scene looks cool.  :D

[Guest]

it will be cool to add those tank as decoration as well, even though no need to move, just placing a army of tanks in the scene looks cool.  :D

I will probably not be adding tanks anytime soon, but there is someone else who is working on adding controllable tanks to this project.

 

On the other hand, the next version of MapViewer will have custom library support, so you will be able to load in whatever 3d models you want. I suppose one could make a custom library with tank models.

Edited August 2, 2019 by ThirdOnion

[Maybe 1]

On 19.07.2019 at 09:29, ThirdOnion said:

MapViewer

 

Hi :)
Really liked the program. Have a few questions. Are there any plans for adding to quick settings the function "lighting" ? (for example Cuba). And one more - Will it be possible to add your tank ? There are people who do paint and would like to see how they look in the game, but I can not do that. You did a terrific tool, but I would like to see more features )

[Maybe 1]

On 4/18/2020 at 1:18 AM, Adriel.RB said:

But someone is working on a map testing tool where you can spawn tanks and it has lighting 

Really looking forward to. As TLVK graphics are bad compared to current...  

[ThirdOnion 4,898]

On 4/14/2020 at 11:33 AM, Maybe said:

Are there any plans for adding to quick settings the function "lighting" ? (for example Cuba).

I'm not entirely sure which lighting settings you mean, but in the future I plan to add more advanced lighting options - such as time of day and sun angle.

[sensei_tanker 3,098]

how hard is it for the devs to add these lighting effects?

[ThirdOnion 4,898]

19 hours ago, sensei_tanker said:

how hard is it for the devs to add these lighting effects?

Which lighting effects in particular? Tanki Online already has fully dynamic shadows, and the engine that the Flash version runs on (Alternativa3D) has had support for various light types for years. In fact the game already has dynamic lighting from shot effects, flags, CP points, the rugby ball, supply crates, etc.

Edited May 1, 2020 by ThirdOnion

[Afkr 18]

How do I add a Tank ?

[ThirdOnion 4,898]

21 hours ago, afkr said:

How do I add a Tank ?

You cannot. MapViewer only supports loading maps and nothing else.

[Akshat.Pr 67]

A very useful tool, excellent work done in a professional way.