Curtis Lemay
Posts: 12969
Joined: 9/17/2004 From: Houston, TX Status: offline
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quote:
ORIGINAL: MarGol I was merely thinking of an alternative to plane maps to be implemented in the game engine itself. By having a spheroid grid mapping the earth's surface, map projection will not be an issue. The hard bit is setting up the hex relations (which hexes are considered adjacent to a particular hex). This is non-trivial, but is done on a regular basis when generating grids e.g. for fluid-dynamical computations (I believe triangular grids are often used, which could be useful here since hex centres form a grid of equilateral triangles). For example, if we arbitrarily choose the North Pole to be hex (0,0), it would be surrounded by hexes (0,1) through (5,1), and so on going southwards. Down at the equator, hex (0,100) would be adjacent to (399,100) or so @ 100 km/hex. Finally, the South Pole would be hex (0,200) or something, surrounded by (0,199) through (5,199). Scrolling around in your map window would be like Google Earth, but since you have such a small patch of the map visible, the curvature would not be a big issue (at the normal zoom level for game play, my [admittedly low] screen resolution usually lets me see 20 hexes width at a time, which would be 2000 km @ 100 km/hex). Hence, the map window could probably look and feel as usual (however, I guess the minimap would be something else!). I think it's far more complicated than what you've indicated. The number of hexes per latitude row would have to be specifically correct to get a sphere. Otherwise, you could end up with, for example, two cones butted together instead - or any other variation on a top. I'm not sure that hexagonals fit together on a sphere at any hex count, much less an arbitrary one. I also don't think the hexes would be displayed in the nice neat rows and columns we have hard-coded in now. They would have more and more curvature to them the closer to the poles one got - ending in a circle right at the pole. Plus, the hexagonals used now aren't regular - they have extra width. Display operations would have to be completely re-coded with new graphics, even if it proves doable. For what? What topic requires the entire world including the poles? I think a more achievable goal would be to model a cylinder. Then, when you right-scrolled hex-column 399 onto the map, hex-column 0 would appear next, etc. That should be good enough for someone wanting to model both the ETO & PTO on the same map.
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