mapping MapPicture

Mapping - Map Picture

Make your map sexy !
Your map should include a preview picture. This picture will be visible from the game menu and from the servers vote screen.

In order to do so:

Load your map in the game and stay observer
Use the command r_letterbox -1 in the console to turn off the HUD (not r_letterbox 1 as it'd add top and bottom borders)
If your map has "waypoint" entities (like CTF or CTS maps), you can hide them with cl_hidewaypoints 1
You may also want to hide powerups with g_powerups 0, as well as weapons, health and armor items with g_pickup_items 0. You'll need to reload the map with restart for these settings to take effect.
Turn off jpeg compression with scr_screenshot_jpeg 0 to avoid a double lossy compression (you'll have to compress it to jpg later)
Take a nice screenshot with F12
Go to your Xonotic user directory, on the data/screenshot subdirectory. Your user directory location depends on your operating system, more information here.
Open the generated .tga screenshot with an image editor, e.g. GIMP
Crop it so that it has a 4:3 ratio, e.g. if resolution is 1366x768 then crop it to 1024x768
Scale it to 512x512 px (the resulting image should appear vertically stretched)
Save it (export in Gimp) as a JPG file (~90% quality); other formats like tga and png aren't acceptable because they generally produce much bigger files
Put it in the same location as the bsp file, with the same name (see next chapter for packaging rules).