Dat Map

08 Mar 2014

I don't want to spend weeks trying to implement a map again. With that in mind I'm just going to cobble something together.

amitp has a glorious map generator up on his site which I'll just import from for now.

Voronoi would take too long to implement and square is too blocky, but hex looks nice.

And hex can easily, but kludgily, be crammed into a square hole by doubling and offsetting the cells.

It works surprisingly well and is extremely effective. Here's how it works.

Each hex cell is sized up to 4 square cells (2x2) which can be considered a single super-cell. Then each other column is shifted by a single cell.

The effect is that each super-cell touches 6 other super-cells by edge instead of 4, and 0 super-cells by corner, also instead of 4. The variance of the distances between cell centres reduces too, from ~40% to ~10%.

I'll probably ignore the super-cells for now and just treat them as regular cells, but it makes biome transitions look much smoother than what going square from the beginning gets you.

Hello World

07 Mar 2014

So, it's that time of year again when I start a game project destined to fail.

I expect to be sidetracked by real life within a month but I'll be documenting my progress and most of everything will be thrown up on github to be perused at your leisure.

Here we go!