Tuesday 15 July 2008

Hexy fun

Things have been a bit slow recently. I'd like to say I've got a heap more stuff done on the RL, but to be honest it's mostly been refactoring and trying to smooth out issues with running it under Ubuntu, when I've had time and energy to devote to the game at all.

I have been spending many cycles on converting the grid to a hex representation, though, and today actually implemented a bit of it over lunch. All the procedural noise and stuff is currently turned off for debuggery, so you can see the hex structure very clearly:


Apart from a massive amount of refactoring and bug-chasing, this doesn't actually have many implications for the game. I simply think the rectangular grid was bringing some problems with the 3D representation into sharp relief; diagonal movement between two pillars generally 'looked' impossible, and the natural walls looked very unnatural. The hexes help in generating more natural-looking shapes, and there are no joined corners to worry about so the mesh can be more sensibly connected.

On the flipside, straight corridors and rectangular rooms cause issues. But what the hell, what's the point of having aztec bee-lizards if they still build boring structures...

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Your missing the obvious answer: Don't have rectangular rooms, only have triangle and hexagonal ones. Although yes corridors are still a problem.

Snut said...

This is a very good point, for the starting area/race non-rectangular buildings will be perfect. I can always restrict the direction of corridors to the six sensible axes, as well.

There might be issues with other races that build in a more human style, but that's in the future and therefore a problem I will ignore!