The map currently shows icons for base mobs, assembled from the current texture pack. I feed in coordinates for each part that goes into the icon (head, nose, ears, horns, etc) and add them all up, based on what I know of the mob's geometry.

This works fine for the base mobs, whose geometry I can study. It doesn't work so well for mobs that are added by mods.

At first I just displayed a blue or red square with a question mark. This remains the fallback, but now people can add custom icons based on the entity's classname (see these two posts detailing the process: http://www.minecraft...0#entry21750680 and http://www.minecraft...st__p__22217786 ). This requires someone to make them, and either package them with the mod they are meant for, or a texture pack, or Zan's itself.

Right now I am working on a possible addition. When the map sees a mob it knows nothing about, it looks at the mobs model for parts named "head" (or that include "head" in the name). It then renders the head, and captures a 2d image of it. This can then be used as the icon.

It works for most mobs, though it misses things like Twilight Forest's Tower Ghasts or Helmet Crabs (things without a distinguishable head really). In those cases I may fall back to looking for a piece called "body". Regardless, some simply won't have a well named piece to find. In this case, it will still fall back (in the absence of custom handmade icons) to the squares like before.

Also sometimes it misses pieces. It catches cow horns (or TF minotaur horns), but misses things like pig snouts (if the texture doesn't have a snout texture on the head portion, it looks like it has no nose). It gets TF deer horns, but not TF boar tusks. currently picks up all pieces

The other issue is scale. Some of the icons might end up looking WTH huge (like TF Hydra head) so i might impose a max size and scale down. Of course, all the TF mobs have custom icons already, so it's academic for them. Could be a big help for other mods though, getting a recognizable icon for most mobs without needing to hand create an icon for them.

Hand created ones are likely to look better (if well done) so I think for that reason, the custom icons will take precedence. But if there isn't one of those, try to render the head and make an icon. If that can't be done, draw a square.

Finally, this will require FBO support. Any Geforce from the 6x00 series and newer (which came out in 2004), and probably ATI cards from around the same time are fine. Intel probably needs something a bit more recent, but most everything should have it. Without FBO, you'll just miss out on this new method. Base icons, custom icons and the squares will work as before