I made a rudimentary HTML-based hex tile generator (i.e. you specify an image, and it uses that as a texture to create a hexagonal tile) tonight, and I'm curious about how far I should take things.

First question -- how useful would something like this be? Basically, the app is an Web page that takes an image file that you specify, and creates a hexagonal version of that image. It preserves tiling (i.e. your seamless texture will remain seamless even after conversion), and can easily add a border onto the result.

Second question -- how much tweaking would be necessary to make this tool worthwhile? What kinds of parameters should be present in order to customize the results of conversion? Making tiles appear darker/lighter than the source, adding borders, highlighting, and so on... what features would be necessary? What might be overkill?

Third question -- assuming that this app can remain portable (i.e. runnable without requiring a Web server... you can currently run the app directly from the HTML file), how helpful would it be to you if the app were available live on a Web site, where you could upload an image and get it converted to a hexagon tile? Would this be preferable to running the HTML file directly?

Apart from those questions, if you have any other suggestions or questions that may relate to this little project, feel free to post them here. I will come back in a bit with a few screen caps of the converter in "action" so you can get an idea of what I've done so far.

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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."

Here is a screen shot of the converter. Right now, just a straight-copy of the original grass texture image, with the resulting hex tile (with a light border) to the right.



The actual PNG file of the result (with alpha channel):



That, more or less, is all there is to it right now. The image used can be specified using the address bar (i.e. "hex-maker.html?image.png"). As long as the image exists and all, it will be loaded into the document and automatically converted.

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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."

I'm not sure, there may be people having a use for it. I certainly don't. I like hexagons, but i'm not a fan of using hex-based grid in games.
For parameters i'd suppose things like width/height/angle would be sufficient, but that might cause problems with the tileability without stretching the textures i suppose.

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Long pork is people!

wzl's burrow

Much coolness.

A configurable border would be handy. My early hex maps used a black border on the image to build the 'grid'. I used to fiddle with the border size to get look of the grid right.

An ability to generate slightly different tiles from a single image would be nice too. I hated drawing several different 'grass' tiles that still worked together.

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10 PRINT "Bad Monkey ";
20 GOTO 10