I've been working on the next type of grid: polar grids. The polar grid is based on polar coordinates, meaning instead of identifying a point's position using X and Y coordinates we use a radius and an angle. The radius tells us how far from the origin the point is and the angle tells us the direction. This screenshot shows the new polar grid in Unity
Another progress update: WorldToGrid and GridToWorld are now implemented.
For those who don't know, those two functions convert a point's coordinates
from world space to grid space, the coordinate system used to locate points
relative to the grid's properties, and back. For rectangular grids it's a
fairly simple idea, the grid can be represented as a standard Cartesian
coordinate system. With hex grids that won't do it, you simply cannot force a
hex grid into a Cartesian coordinate system, you need to find something else.
Fortunately there are several topologically identical possibilities with
easier, more intuitive coordinate systems. For the first release I have decided
to use the herringbone pattern:
The align feature has been giving me quite some headache lately. For small objects it's easy, just fit them inside the nearest hex. It gets more interesting once your object spans over more than one hex. Here is a screenshot from the game "Age of Wonders" for PC (I upscaled the image manually, AoW has a very low resolution)
Good news at last, I just finished the finding functions for vertices, both in grid space and in world space. Here is a screenshot where the yellow gizmo indicates the vertex closest to the grey sphere.
Good news at last, I just finished the finding functions for vertices, both in grid space and in world space. Here is a screenshot where the yellow gizmo indicates the vertex closest to the grey sphere.
Here's a quick status update:
I have finished the drawing part for hex grids. As I mentioned before, there are many ways to draw hex grids and I want to cover as many of them as possible. Let's count all the possibilities that work now.
It has been over a week since my last post, so I might as well explain what's going on. As I finished rendering I had tightened up all loose ends that were left, I consider Grid Framework to be complete for rectangular grids. You can perform all the common calculations, debug things and visualize the grid properly, either using simple lines or even Vectrosity. This is just the first step though. Hex grids are very popular for games for various reasons, so it makes perfect sense to do them next, right? Well, here is where the problem starts.
Well, I wanted to do this sooner or later anyway, so I made a custom editor for the rectangular grid. Before this I was using the default inspector panel:
Take a look at this: