Rotate player's sprite on automap according to its angle

[Kzer-Za]

Currently, the player sprite is always facing one direction in non-Duke games. So if the player has selected in options to not rotate automap, there is no way to tell what way the player is facing, except in Duke where the sprite is in top-down perspective and rotated. In other games (at least in Exhumed and Blood) the player sprite is in side perspective and only from one side: front. It is not a problem when the automap is rotated, because then the player on the automap is always facing "up".

However, on the non-rotated automap "up" is north, and the player may be facing any other direction, with no way to tell which one. I'm going to attach two screenshots to illustrate it. On the first one the map is in "overlay" mode (sorry, I don't know how it's called properly), so you can see that the player is facing west, the direction of the passage.

2021-12-09_17-07-32.jpg

On the second one the map is in "textured" mode, the player is facing the same direction, but you can't tell it.

2021-12-09_17-07-34.jpg

It would be nice if the player sprite could be rotated according to its angle, i.e. the direction it's facing. I'm gonna try to explain the idea by the example from GZDoom.

In GZDoom there is a PowerScanner powerup, which displays sprites of all actors on the automap, including the player. And if you enable the option to display rotated sprites on the automap, you can tell which way they all are facing, including the player. Find the illustration on the third screenshot. You can see that the player sprite is facing the same direction as the automap arrow.

2021-12-09_17-17-04.jpg

If it's impossible or too much work, then it would be nice to at least have an option to display an automap arrow instead of the player sprite. I suppose, since there is an option to not rotate the automap, then I'm not the only one who likes more when the automap always has north facing "up", but in that case we need to be able to tell which way we are facing on the map.

[mjr4077au]

We're probably limited here by the assets included in the game. If the art files include suitable top-down sprites we could use, like Duke does, we'll absolutely use them.

[Nash]

Shadow Warrior and Redneck Rampage also have the top-down sprites for the player. So this is a problem limited to only Blood and Powerslave.

That said though, I think even if there were new top-down sprite assets made for these 2 games, there'd be the question of whether it'd be an acceptable change to have enabled by default, or not - knowing how, erm, passionate the player base is for these classic games, I'm sure someone will complain with the argument that the original games didn't have them...

[Graf Zahl]

The Blood code comes right from the source, the game didn't do it better.
Powerslave didn't even have a player on the automap, but the animation format of this game is so horrendously fucked up that I haven't managed yet to extract the player animation for use here.

So if you want to make them, be my guest, butfor Powerslave the main problem here would be matching them to the animation because it's virtually impossible to extract from how the game manages this stuff.

[Nash]

Crappy, low effort attempt at Caleb (I scribbled this in like 5 minutes lol). Not sure if it's worth pursuing...

(if I were to do this properly, I would at least make a replica model of Caleb to use as a base, rather than drawing it completely by hand like what I did here)

[Kzer-Za]

What about an option to replace the player sprite with a map arrow then? I only made a suggestion about rotating the player sprite because I thought it would not be hard to implement. But if it's time/effort-consuming, then of course I realize there are more interesting features to spend your time on. But just replacing the player sprite with a map arrow can be done easily, or am I wrong? Because the main problem is that if you open the textured non-rotated automap, you can't tell which way your character is facing. And it complicates the navigation, while automap is supposed to facilitate it