When driving round in video video games, whether or not racing video games like Mario Kart or open-world video games like GTA, the sport usually shows a mini map within the nook of the display that reveals the place the automobile is in relation to the remainder of the playable space. This concept goes again properly earlier than the primary in-vehicle GPS techniques, and though these real-world mini maps are commonplace now, they don’t have the identical really feel because the mini maps from retro video video games. [Garage Tinkering] got down to remedy this downside, and do it on minimal {hardware}.
Earlier than attending to the {hardware}, although, the map itself wanted to be created. [Garage Tinkering] is modeling his mini map on Want For Pace: Underground 2, together with layers and waypoints. By means of a mix of varied open info sources he was capable of put collectively a complete map of the UK and code it for most important roads, aspect roads, waterways, and woodlands, in addition to including in waypoints like automobile parks, gasoline/petrol stations, and prepare stations, and coding their colours and gradients to match that of his favourite retro racing sport.
To get this big and detailed map onto small {hardware} isn’t a straightforward process, although. He’s utilizing an ESP32 with a built-in round display, which implies it might probably’t retailer the entire map directly. As a substitute, the map is cut up right into a grid, every related to a latitude and longitude, and solely the grids which might be wanted are loaded at anyone time. The main concession made for the sake of the {hardware} was to forgo rotating the grid squares to maintain the automobile icon pointed “up”. Rotating the grids took an excessive amount of processing energy and made the map updates jittery, so as an alternative, the map stays pointed north, and the automobile icon rotates. This isn’t fully devoted to the sport, nevertheless it appears to be like significantly better on this {hardware}.
The final step was to truly wire all of it up, get actual GPS knowledge from a receiver, and match it into the automobile for real-world use. [Garage Tinkering] has a 350Z that that is going into, which can be period-correct to recreate the aesthetics of this online game. Every thing works as anticipated and masses easily, which most likely shouldn’t be a shock given how a lot time he spent engaged on the programming. If you happen to’d quite take real-world knowledge right into a online game as an alternative of online game knowledge into the true world, we’ve additionally seen builds that do issues like take Open Avenue Map knowledge into Minecraft.
Due to [Keith] for the tip!
