A FiveM minimap for drift and racing servers

The radar is a corner preview

On a race or a touge run the minimap is not telling you where to go — you already know, or there is a route line doing it. It is telling you what the road does next: whether the bend tightens, whether there is a junction on the exit, whether the next section is a straight long enough to settle the car on.

So road geometry has to survive being drawn three pixels wide, and anything competing with the road for attention is a liability. Landuse colour, terrain texture, district shading and baked numbers are all noise in this context, however good they look when the car is parked.

It also means the zoom a racing server sees most is the tight one. The radar pulls in as speed rises, so these players see the map at its most magnified almost all the time — the opposite of a roleplay server, which mostly sees it zoomed out in traffic.

Canyons, mountains and the roads that are hardest to draw

The good driving in San Andreas is on the roads stock minimaps handle worst. Tongva Valley, the Great Ocean Highway, the runs down from Chiliad and the Vinewood Hills are all single-tier roads winding over terrain, and on a flat map they are thin grey lines on a thin grey background.

Two things fix that. Terrain treatment that gives the ground a shape, so a road along a ridge looks like a road along a ridge, and the same dark casing under the minor tier that the motorways get, so a mountain road stays separated from the hillside it is cut into. The topographic palettes take it furthest: elevation colour and contour lines mean a driver can see that the next section drops before the car does.

• Minor-tier roads cased like the motorways, not left as hairlines
• Terrain relief so canyon runs have a readable shape
• Contour lines on the two topographic palettes
• No baked numbering competing with the road network

Skip the postals

Postal numbers exist so a dispatcher can speak a location out loud. A drift server has no dispatcher, and meets get called by name — the docks, the airport, the hills — rather than by a four-digit code. Numbers printed across a map nobody reads them from are pure clutter at the one zoom level that matters.

The street-names-only base is the usual pick. A fair number of racing servers go further and treat the names as something they only ever see on the pause map, which is fine; either choice beats numbers.

Every clip carries the map

Drift and racing communities run on video. Clips go to Discord, to TikTok, to a showcase channel, and the minimap is in the corner of every single one of them. It is the only piece of server interface guaranteed to be in frame whatever the driver is doing.

That makes a distinctive palette worth more here than on a roleplay server, and a small corner mark worth more than a large logo. A wordmark over the ocean is invisible in a clip, because the radar is zoomed into a road ten miles inland; what makes a clip recognisable as yours is either a mark near the coastline or simply a palette nobody else is running.

Elements are $1.00 each on top of the $8.00 map, so a map with a wordmark and a small credit line is $10.00, once.

What the map does not do

It does not draw your track, your checkpoints or your leaderboard — those are blips and HUD from your race resource, and they sit on top of any map. If you run one fixed circuit you can print its outline into the art as an image element so it is permanently there, which some servers do for their signature course and nothing else.

And if you run an added drift map or a ported track, the minimap will not show it until somebody puts it there. That is a separate problem, and it has its own page.