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How the game stores its map

GTA V does not hold one big map picture. It holds a grid of square tiles, and minimap.ymt says how that grid is laid out: 2 columns by 3 rows, each tile 4500 game units across, with the top left corner of the whole thing at X -4140, Y 8400. That is the box the map lives in, and nothing outside it exists.

The same file says which set of textures each screen reads, and there are two:

• minimap_<row>_<col> is what the rotating minimap draws. In the stock game these are 512 px and hold land only, because the game paints its own sea underneath them.
• minimap_sea_<row>_<col> is what the pause menu map draws. In the stock game these are 1024 px and include the sea.

The row comes first in the name because there are three rows and only two columns, so minimap_sea_2_1 is the bottom right tile. Each one ships as its own .ytd, which is what makes this easy: a streamed file with the same name replaces it.

How to use it

1. Pick your layers. Leave the map render on and you get a satellite style map of the real Los Santos with no artwork at all. Turn it off when your own picture is replacing the world.
2. Load your artwork and drag it on the map until it sits where it belongs. Pull a corner to resize, or type the centre and size in game units. Fit the stock map lines it up with the 2 by 3 grid, Snap to whole tiles puts its edges on tile boundaries.
3. Set the look if you want it brighter, flatter or tinted. It is applied to the finished tile, so the thumbnails are the real textures.
4. Choose the output. Tile size, DXT1 or DXT5, mipmaps, and which of the two sets to write. Both is the normal answer.
5. Download resource, drop the folder in resources, add ensure and restart the whole server.

Things worth knowing

• A resource restart is not enough. Streamed assets are read once when the server starts. If the old map is still there, clear the server cache folder and the client cache too.
• The radar set can be transparent. The game draws its sea as a shape under those tiles, so anything you leave empty in a radar tile shows sea rather than a hole. The pause map has nothing underneath, so empty is empty there.
• DXT1 has one bit of alpha. A pixel is solid or gone, never half. Use DXT5 if your artwork has a soft edge, and DXT1 when it covers the tile completely and you want half the file size.
• Keep mipmaps on. Without them the pause map sparkles as soon as it is zoomed out.
• Tiles are not roads. A GPS route only draws where the game has path nodes, so a new area needs its own nodes before routing works over it.
• Nothing here is a script. The resource is a manifest and a stream folder, so it cannot fight your HUD or your framework.

Tiles outside the grid

If your artwork reaches past the 2 by 3 grid, those tiles have nowhere to live in a stock game: the map scaleform only ever asks for the six it knows about. Extra Map Tiles by Alex Licuriceanu solves that with its own modified map scaleform, and it counts tiles in the same 4500 unit steps from the same origin this page does. So when a tile lands outside the grid, this page builds the texture and writes the config rows to paste into that resource. The textures stay in the resource you download here, because once a texture dictionary is streamed any resource can ask for it by name.

Extra Map Tiles is released under the PolyForm Noncommercial License 1.0.0. Read its terms before you put it on a server people pay for. Nothing from it is copied here: the code on this page is our own and the scaleform is not ours to ship.

Everything stays in your browser

The tiles are drawn, block compressed and written into .ytd files on your own machine, by the same texture code behind the Texture Editor and the YTD Optimizer. Your artwork is never uploaded. Save project writes the placement and the look as JSON, and Share puts the same settings in the page address, without the picture.

Want to reshape the minimap itself rather than what is drawn on it? That is the Minimap Editor.