I dont think that most of you really grasp the design that I have in mind these maps will be nothing more then custom bitmaps you will be able to draw to them just like any other map,only they will use brushes rather then colors in the rendering process. IE a quad-tree, where you can also push a reference to the individual hex tiles into. Long story short : You can and often should have multiple spatial representations that you keep in sync as different algorithmic techniques work best with different representations. Hexes will partition into triangles obviously, but there's nothing stopping you dividing those triangles again and using these smaller triangles to refine the path finding. Steering algorithms combined with this step as well as an additional heuristic calculation for partially occupied hexes would decouple your entities from the hex paradigm (if you so wish).
#Free hex map maker free#
buildings can be placed free form onto the hex map and then bounds checked to determine which hexes are totally obscured / partially obscured. There's no reason you can't combine two path finding techniques, use hex as the first quick step and refine as the path is traveled using a higher resolution /alternate representation. Just throwing in my two pennies - You don't to have to have your map representation (hex) constrain the entities within it's spatial paradigm. You can read a bit about this design here:
![free hex map maker free hex map maker](https://i2.wp.com/blog.worldanvil.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/5-BES-MAPMAKING-SOFTWARE-THUMBNAIL.jpg)
So as User137 I would also suggest to you to use triangles based map design itself or to be more specific same design that was used for Settlers. Check "Missionforce Cyberstorm" for example. The second and probably the bigest problem is that by using hex maps you can forget about any height representations as they wil look ugly. But that game used a bunch of verry small hexagons so they were barely noticable. Even thou i have seen a game that used hex grids and looked quite well. There will always be thet hexagonial look. Without specialy designed autotiles like in Civilization 5 you will have problems of making any straight edges. With hex grids you easily gets depth perception by simply rendering hex grid on 3D plane.īut as it was already pointed out hex grids have their drawbacks: Hex grids were never ment to look good but instead they simplify some game mechanics like pathfinding (distance betwen two neighbouring tiles is always the same), range checking, etc. But if one has to choose between square grid and hexagon grid in that kind of game, and if it's about game mechanics, hexagon feels more natural. The tile-blending graphics are some advanced shadering and modelling. I think what hexagons fit best is kind of grid-based games such as Civilization 5īut what is seen in that image for world terrain, is extremely complex to do (it's kind of what i tried to achieve in thread i posted in previous message, i couldn't find a shader algorithm that would make 1 of 6 corners straighten like that shoreline at bottom left). You can't just render the map in 1 big PNG and use it for whole game world, if that is the idea? Map is always somehow tied to game logics. The stone walls are also showing clearly the drawback of hexagon technique - edgy straights. The screenshot you showed in last message is very strictly tying game objects to hexagon grid. I'm not sure if i understood this part earlier.
![free hex map maker free hex map maker](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/9bj5Qu6q_Tg/maxresdefault.jpg)
I must say though that my interest is not to create a hex based game but as a way to create nice looking maps with out alot of work.