Improving minimaps discussion
 

Hi, I would like this thread to be a discussion on how to improve minimaps, this is not a feature request thread, just a way to share ideas on what's doable or not to improve them.

Note that I am not a minimap addon author myself because I don't think there's a need for a new minimap addon unless introducing something revolutionary new.

So here is my first idea:
The town / zone maps have blank zones on the edges which make them weird to use as minimaps especially when your character is located in these.
With the emergence of higher definition world maps like:
HighlyDetailedWorldMap
or maybe
AccurateWorldMap
wouldn't it be better to use the world map tiles of these addons to display a minimap without blank parts/ edges limit ? (maybe just the few corresponding to the zone to avoid loading too much)
Asking the devs : What would be the pro/cons of this idea? :)

Con: everything you want to change about maps where you do not use the provided zo_worldmap (e.g. Just show the world map as small one in the minimap space) will need you to recode all pins and their positions, their update each n milliseconds, etc. So you basically double the load at the cpu and you decrease performance. If you play in groups that even sums up more.

One should try to reuse ZOs map code and just show it small so all benefits of libraries for pins, positions etc are using the same code once and apply on the normal (big) world map and the minimap (based on the normal world map).

Im not sure one can identify these map textures properly and exchange them, but only these and not all others too. But I'm neither a minimap or map dev. Just knowing there were several and severe problems of you tried to recode your own minimap, without reusing ZOs world map.