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Switching to hex grids in Rafterlife

Hex-grid ship (center) in hex-grid terrain

I've sort of decided to use (and halfway implemented the use of) hex grids instead of square grids for everything in Rafterlife. The main reasons for switching are:

  1. The planet in the game will be a single grid, and the hex grid has less directional aliasing as the world turns.
  2. The hex grid has more uniform neighbor relationships: six edge neighbors in the hex grid vs. four edge and four vertex (diagonal) neighbors in the square grid.
  3. Most mining and crafting games that I've seen use a square grid. I want to try something different.

Changing enough of the code to generate terrain and get something interactive but incomplete went quicker than expected. The hex grid is backed by a rectangular grid where only half of the cells are used, forming a checkerboard pattern. Amit Patel calls this doubled coordinates. Since Lua tables are naturally sparse, I don't bother remapping the indices to something contiguous. One follow-up change that seems appealing is to switch the index order from grid[x][y] to grid[y][x], so that less Lua tables are required for the pointy-topped hex grid.