isometric hexes?

[Inverse Icarus]

i was just fooling around with c++ and the terrain files found in the UI source code, and i made simple program to populate an x by y hex grid. i filled them all in with grasslands for a start, then i made 1 a forest, and gave one a population (all the others have zero).

i made it determing where the forest is, and i had it place a city on the square with a population. when i did this i realized how limited hex graphics can be.

i'm not claiming to be a graphic artist, indeed i'm FAR from it, but to make some sort of psuedo 3d effect we'll need isometrics, and any attempt at an isometric hex seems odd to me.

anyway, heres a stupid scrren shot of my feeble programming (most of it chopped off for image size).

[Jon Shafer]

My lord, why aren't you working for ILM!!!! (Industrial Light and Magic, the team that does the Star Wars special effects)

[Leland]

The impression I have is that the current map code in the UI was never intended to be anything but a show that "okay we got some sort of map here on the back". I think that when we really start coding it (if ever...) it should be done with polygons all the way. DirectX8 no longer even has API for 2d graphics, and by drawing polys it's possible to take advantage of hardware acceleration when scrolling and zooming around. I think the map should initially be viewed from above without any perspective trickery, but with polygonal graphics switching to different view would be trivial in case we ever need it.

Okay, so who's going to do it? Uhm... I guess I might have some motivation... sometime... Maybe next week.

[Inverse Icarus]

Originally posted by Trip
My lord, why aren't you working for ILM!!!! (Industrial Light and Magic, the team that does the Star Wars special effects)

oh shut up you.

[dervish]

I think that "hex tile" has few adjacent tiles - 6 - (restriction of movement directions), the present diamond-shaped square tile has more adjacent tiles than "hex" has - 8. Triangle tiles would have even more adjacent tiles - from 10 to 12. Has anyone tried anything with triangles?

[Leland]

The so called "adjacent" tiles in diamond or square-based maps is an illusion, because the actual distance between the centers of all the adjacent tiles is not really the same. If we let the distance between two rectangular tiles connected through sides be 1, then the distance between tiles connected through corners is square root of 2. In case of triangles this is even worse, as the distance between two "adjacent" tiles in one direction may be twice as much as in another direction.

[dervish]

OK. I get the drift...