Hey everyone, I wanted to talk for a second about Hex Grids and Spacewars. Hex Grids actually appeal to the game designer and programmer in me separately -- so I find them pretty interesting. Hex Grids have many properties, and for humans, most of them are good. A human looking at a square grid in a game can instinctively understand, oh, I can move in 4x directions! Diagonals? Oh I can move in 8x! However, being able to move in 8 directions actually influences play a lot. You either have a lot of freedom or very little. For tabletop games, the answer was easy, hex grids! Its more interesting than a flat grid, and you dont have all the omni-directional movement. Also, putting it plainly, pentagon grids are freaking odd looking, and octogon are shaped funny, and dont give you any less movement than a square grid anyway. Since humans are so great at finding patterns, its easy to look a board and know where stuff is. Hex Grids have many properties, mathematically, most of them are not good. The math for moving about a hex grid is actually pretty complex. Humans are great at looking at things and picking out patterns, but computers need to be told. On a square grid, its a cartesian coordinate system -- rows and columns. However, hex grids dont have rows and columns, they actually have 3 axis, and only one of them is horizontal or vertical. For picking out in 3D space, a hex is made up 6 triangles, each of which are exactly 60 degrees (60 * 6 = 360, yay math class).. and so on and so on. Line of Sight Line of sight in spacewars is very intuitive for the player. However, the math for it gets pretty hairy. In some cases, its actually very simple. Does my viewing angle cross through any nodes? However, in some cases, its a bit more involved than that. On a hex grid, its possible to view directly through two different nodes at the same. In that case, BOTH nodes would need to be passable for you to have line of sight... Thats about it for now, more to come!
That's why Civ moved to Hexes too... more complicated to develop a game in hexes but its worth the strategy value
What is the constraint on the hexgrid coordinate system? I am used to seeing X+Y+Z = 0 but yours seems to be Y=X+Z.
