Hex grid progress so far

Here’s a quick status update:

• Drawing: This works perfectly now, the hexes are drawn properly as described in the post before, and now i have added lines that connect the different layers of the grid.
• Rendering: Like drawing almost finished, except one minor issue. In the rectangular grids you can specify a width for the rendered line and, since the line is drawn in 2D, I had to calculate the directions in which to expand the lines. There were only three possible directions and the lines were sorted by X, Y and Z, so it was enough to calculate each of the three directions only once. With hex grids one set of lines is zig-zagged, so I need to calculate four directions total. I need to find a nice way to separate the two differently slanted lines. I don’t want to calculate the direction for every line as that would be a waste of resources.
• Find nearest face & Get face coordinates: done, although only for the default coordinate system.
• Find nearest box & Get box coordinates: done, just like above

This leaves the following functions:

• Find nearest vertex & Get vertex coordinates: The challenge here lies in finding a nice coordinate system, and by nice I mean one that’s intuitive to understand, easy to implement and easy to maintain
• Build vertex matrix & read vertex matrix: Getting the vertices is already done, the challenge again lies in finding a good coordinate system.
• Align & Scale transform: shouldn’t pose any problems
• World to Grid & Grid to World: you guessed it, deciding on a coordinate system
• Get Vectrosity Points: This will take the same points as used by rendering and drawing, but the array has to be processed first to fit Vectrosity’s requirements

So, all in all it looks pretty good. Unfortunately progress has been dragged down by my studies, I’m writing exams soon, so I can’t afford to work on Grid Framework full time. The plan is to finish all the needed functionality for the first release. After that additional coordinate systems will be added and after that I’ll add more drawing shapes like triangular and circular hex grids. That will conclude the hex grid chapter of Grid Framework.