It seemed natural to me as Battletech maps use that orientation.

http://www.scrapyardarmory.com/wp-conte ... errain.jpg

I'll have a dig through the rules and see if they can be used sideways.

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10 PRINT "Bad Monkey ";
20 GOTO 10

I feel that the diagonals in Codehead's hex grid are reminiscent of the diagonals in isometric.

If the image were rotated 90 degrees, the diagonals would be steep, and unlike isometric.

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I ain't pushing no moon buttons.

TwoBit's early StarTrek screens (viewtopic.php?f=16&t=10786) show the hexes in that orientation too.

However, as we were talking about making the hexmap as flexible as possible, perhaps both options should be supported?

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10 PRINT "Bad Monkey ";
20 GOTO 10

Looksee...

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I ain't pushing no moon buttons.

Like I said, I'm not complaining. I've just seen it done the "other way" most of the time. I actually prefer it, but if I'm the only one, it wouldn't be the first time.

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What most people don't understand about "enlightenment" is that it is not an end-goal; but where you find yourself just before taking a new "first step."

Stop the presses!!!

If you want to go 2D, the way you guys do your tiles will be WRONG. WRONG WRONG WRONG. It will *triple* the minimum necessary sprite graphics required by the game.

Think about it. If it doesn't become clear why, I am working on a graphic demonstration of why we should *NOT* use horizontally oriented hexes. I will post it here ASAP.

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What most people don't understand about "enlightenment" is that it is not an end-goal; but where you find yourself just before taking a new "first step."

If the sprites are drawn obliquely, rather than overhead, then...
Vertically stacked hexes
Sprites can face: North/NorthWest/SouthWest/South. Reflect for NorthEast/SouthEast = 4 sprites drawn
Horizontally stacked hexes
Sprites can face: NorthWest/West/SouthWest. Reflect for NorthEast/East/SouthEast = 3 sprites drawn

If the sprites are drawn true overhead, then...
Vertically stacked hexes
Sprites can face: North/NorthWest. Reflect for other four = 2 sprites drawn
Horizontally stacked hexes
Sprites can face: West/NorthWest. Reflect for other four = 2 sprites drawn

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I ain't pushing no moon buttons.

OK, here goes:

If we vertically orient our hexes, we need to draw our 2D sprites in one orientation (side-view):



And optionally mirror the image from the other side:



And that's that. It's not perfect; but convincing enough for movement.

---

Now if we orient our hex maps horizontally, not only do we have to do side views for our sprites:





Unless we want our units to look like they crab-walk, we need toward-facing orientation...



As well as away-facing orientation...



Thus, tripling the bare minimum of sprite images we will need. Imagine all the animations for walking; shooting; getting hit; and so on, and think about how much overhead that adds to our graphics!

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What most people don't understand about "enlightenment" is that it is not an end-goal; but where you find yourself just before taking a new "first step."

Wrong. See post above.

EDIT: Sorry for being terse and coming off like a jerk, Jasmine. My apologies!


... then wouldn't that make it more difficult to easily tell different types of units apart?

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What most people don't understand about "enlightenment" is that it is not an end-goal; but where you find yourself just before taking a new "first step."

And in case there are any doubters as to why the vertical orientation is better:



NOTE -- the hexes and iso-tiles in the example here are both based on 64-pixel-width images. No finagling to make them "fit" necessary.

(As an aside, the 2D Fallout games use hex-grids based on my orientation. Note the sides of the hex cursor.)

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What most people don't understand about "enlightenment" is that it is not an end-goal; but where you find yourself just before taking a new "first step."

Holy mass debate Batman!

I'm going away for the weekend, so I won't have any input on this for a while. However, I still think the HexMap engine could support both modes.

I was going for top down in the Battletech game, I suppose isometric is doable too though.

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10 PRINT "Bad Monkey ";
20 GOTO 10

Heh! Maybe I did get a little carried away...


Eh? Are you talking about the tile maps, or the sprites?

If you mean the sprites, I just assumed that our units would be drawn from a "to-the-side" view to some degree, as a straight-down from the tip-top image hides a lot of detail. In other words -- do you want to see a human character's facial features, what it is wearing, and so on; or do you just want to see the top of his head? The straight-on top-down view makes it more difficult to distinguish recognizable features that way -- unless of course your unit is more distinguishable from the top (like many space ship designs), thus making a directly overhead camera angle more desirable.

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What most people don't understand about "enlightenment" is that it is not an end-goal; but where you find yourself just before taking a new "first step."

Top-down works for MegaMek, which is more or less what I'm going for here.



I did a bit of fiddling with the code tonight. I've thrown in a function that sets up the hexes to a given size (across flats or across points) and orientation. It's only working for across flats and vertical stack at the moment, but I can extend it to handle across points sizes and horizontal stacking quite easily.

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10 PRINT "Bad Monkey ";
20 GOTO 10

Ah, good work Karl! Yeah, I can see how 90-degree top-down can work for this (best part is that you can just animate once, and just rotate the sprite in code). If the sprites were mostly the same/similar (i.e. rigidly humanoid) it would be a problem, but with a broader range of sprite shapes, one-angle sprites are quite doable.

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What most people don't understand about "enlightenment" is that it is not an end-goal; but where you find yourself just before taking a new "first step."

Screenshot Time!



30 units across flats, vertical stack




40 units across points, horizontal stack.

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10 PRINT "Bad Monkey ";
20 GOTO 10

That looks great.

Is one map the rotation of the other, or have you programmed the two grids separately?

The reason I ask is because when users design maps, they may want to play them in either horizontal or vertical format. If one grid is a rotation of the other, then there is no problem. But if they are programmed separately, then the map may not look the same because of how rows and columns get jiggled about moving from one alignment to the other.

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I ain't pushing no moon buttons.

I was wondering this too, having noticed that the positions of the tiles in those two images really don't match...

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What most people don't understand about "enlightenment" is that it is not an end-goal; but where you find yourself just before taking a new "first step."

Yeah, basically the x and y axes are switched, but I didn't switch the row and column counters. That's why the pattern is skewed.

I was thinking about it last night, the origin stays in the bottom left corner, so the whole map is flipped diagonally rather than rotated 90 degrees CW.

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10 PRINT "Bad Monkey ";
20 GOTO 10

I did a bunch of thinking rather than coding last night (my head still hurts). One of my goals setting out on this project was to cut through the junk and get the game mechanics going without worrying about fluff and eye-candy that could be added afterwards.

I figured if I could get something playable going quickly and stay agile, I would keep my interest levels up and prevent this project going the same way as most of my other stuff (unfinished).

However, in trying to build a 'hexmap engine', I'm getting bogged with feature creep already. I spent a good hour the other night trying to think of neutral names for column and row variables so that when the map was rotated and built horizontally, the names would still make sense.

For BattleTech (and StarTrek, I think), the hexes only need to be drawn the way that they were in the first screenshot I posted last Friday. I've spent a week adding fluff that isn't required (for my goals) and compromising my design with bodges before I'd even got started.

I still think the Universal HexMap engine is a cool idea, but I'm going to work towards the original goal in the short term and maybe I can revisit the fluff later when it won't push me off course quite so much.

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10 PRINT "Bad Monkey ";
20 GOTO 10

Stak and Stag.

These are the Staxes (to rhyme with axes. (Singular is Staxis))

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I ain't pushing no moon buttons.