ViscountPenguin2 days ago
You can get a lot of the benefits of hexagonal grids with triangular grids if you play your cards right. For example, you can allow units on a given triangle to move as if they were on the hexagonal grid that's formed by gluing triangles together at their corners.
[deleted]2 days agocollapsed
tiffanyh2 days ago
Original HN post (43 comments / 3-years ago)
o11c2 days ago
I suggest using triangles in pairs, since diamonds form a grid nicely.
5 large strips (with 4 macro-triangles each) can form an icosahedron in a fairly sane way.
But IMO the biggest mistake people make is trying to make everything fit on a single square; multi-tile objects are very useful. And at that point, why not make everything take several tiles?
Abandoning tiles entirely in favor of node adjacency can cut memory a lot but requires more thought.
noduerme2 days ago
I don't know if this is the real historical reason, but if you're doing something 2.5D, isometric, at with 2D graphics, at anything other than a 45 degree angle, then anything larger than one square creates clipping problems because part of it should either be behind another sprite on a square whose closest vertex is closer to the camera than the furthest vertex of the forward element. Z-ordering things on the ground between those elements gets even trickier. Making each building (or part of a building) stay within one square is by far the easiest way out of that predicament.
pspeter32 days ago
Great write up on the pros of triangle grids. Did you consider using irregular triangles to help with the math? Eg a 2:1 triangle
vismit20002 days ago
Obligatory hex grids explanation by Amit Patel from reblobgames: https://www.redblobgames.com/grids/hexagons/
stevage2 days ago
What a great write-up.
I'd love to see board games use irregular grids, in the way they describe: different cell sizes/shapes suit different kinds of buildings/units.
ortusdux2 days ago
Has anyone made a game using an aperiodic grid (Penrose or the like)? Would make for a fun challenge.
o11c2 days ago
ompogUe17 hours ago
(From the developer who brought you the PuTTY SSH tools!)
dtgriscom2 days ago
Check out Townscaper.
stevage2 days ago
Wow, another great writeup. I did a sort of half-arsed version of that here: https://stevebennett.me/2020/01/03/alternative-earth-procedu...
I basically took a square grid and then just randomly displaced each of the vertices a bit to disguise the fact that there is a grid at all. I just wasn't really clever enough to come up with any other way to do deterministic procedural generation.
orthoxerox2 days ago
It's not aperiodic, but I remember a roguelike game on a hyperbolic surface, resulting in more than six neighboring cells in some dungeons.
mcphagea day ago
I'd like to see games using half-square grids—a square grid where units default to 2x2. That gets you a lot of the benefits of both squares and hexes.