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:
- The planet in the game will be a single grid, and the hex grid has less directional aliasing as the world turns.
- 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.
- 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.