Curtis Lemay
Posts: 12969
Joined: 9/17/2004 From: Houston, TX Status: offline
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quote:
ORIGINAL: MarGol As some of you may have noticed, I am working on some tools useful for generating hex grids. This made me think a bit on what is actually meant by map scale when dealing with a map consisting of hexagons. To illustrate what I am getting at, see the attached image taken from EA. Now, in my board-game mind the distance between two hexes is given by taking the shortest path between the hexes. Hence, the distance between Saarbrücken and Mainz is four hexes, as is the distance between Saarbrücken and Koblenz. If the hex size is defined by the green line indicated in the pic, the geometrical distance to Koblenz is indeed four hex sizes. However, the geometrical distance to Mainz is only 3.46 hex sizes. The two examples are the extremes, and taking the distance between randomly chosen hexes, the distance per hex is found to be 0.93 hex sizes, with a 7% spread around that value. So: what is the map scale? Is it the hex size, is it 0.93 times the hex size, or something else? Maybe this is a non-issue, or you experienced scenario designers out there have ways to take this into account? As another example, I took some 20 locations from the map of EA, read off the TOAW map coordinates, looked up the corresponding long/lat coordinates elsewhere, and calculated distances both in hexes and in kilometers. The mean distance per hex turned out to be 31.45 +- 1.81 km/hex. Note that the spread is nearly 7%, in line with the above discussion. You simply have to make a choice. Nothing will change the fact that the distance to Koblenz and Mainz is the same in hexes. You can only make one of the paths correct. My choice, with my Latlong program, was to make the east-west path correct, along with the north-south path. That means that the diagonal paths are off a bit. Methods that superimpose a hex grid over a digital map, may get the diagonals correct, instead.
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