I have a concept and main ideas for a game ready, today I sat to start bringing the thing to live, but I got myself into trouble right at the beginning. I am not an expert when it comes to coding, just an amateur making games for fun, so I like to have everything planned.
The game is a 3D puzzle/adventure with elements of RPG. The levels consist of hexagonal tiles placed at varying heights and with different accessibility. I think Olive by Beck Sebenius is a good reference point to what I’m planning.
The three things about the grid I’d like to introduce are:
tiles have different logics (land, water, ice, lava etc.) affecting their walk ability and interactions with game objects,
if the height difference between neighbouring tiles is higher than a set limit, the two tiles are considered disconnected and cannot be walked from one to another,
certain objects (fences, walls etc.) also disconnect two tiles. NOTE: some of these objects (e.g. gates) change their state, so they don’t disconnect the tiles for the whole time.
The whole disconnecting thing is giving me headache. Because the game uses pathfinding I have to store the walk ability data in some form (e.g. as an array) which changes dynamically. With a possibility of neighbouring tiles both being accessible but disconnected from each other this becomes hard. Having another array with tile connection data means a lot of additional data to handle and complicates the pathfinding to the point beyond my programming capability. What would you do?
This was moved to the wrong forum. Should be in scripting or general I think…
Anyway, hex maps are actually surprisingly difficult to code stuff against. The coordinate systems are difficult to reason with, and that makes it way harder to work with than a conventional grid.
Nice article. The axial coordinate system looks the easiest to code against for this use case, it has the cleanest relationship between neighbours.
But I agree, I certainly wouldn’t target a hex grid unless you can solve every problem for a square grid first. No point trying to learn pathfinding on a hex system.
I am aware of all the problems related to hex against square issue, the coordinate change isn’t that much of a problem (I’m far better skilled as a mathematician than a programmer), in fact it’s just about changing the coordinate system and related equations. The real problem is the disconnecting tiles via objects.
The Asset Store may prove helpful, I haven’t looked at RAIN AI for Unity before (I hope it will be able to work with my grid, it would mean the rest of features would work as well), there’s also outdated Simply A* offered for free.
EDIT: Oh my, I’ve just instantiated a Waypoint Network with RAIN and there’s a huge Connect/Disconnect button in their editor, I think I’m getting closer to solving the problem.
A buddy of mine pointed me to that Red Blog article a couple of weeks ago. It is simply fantastic, I wish I could find articles that comprehensive on other random topics. Everything you need to know is right there in one place. I knew virtually nothing about hex grids, and was able to hit the ground running with that article. I built a hex map editor and have pathing, and basic pathfinding in about a week thanks to it.
Damn, these are very good looking screens, they make me want to steal your code somehow…
How’s the performance? I got myself to a point where a 40x40 grid caused massive FPS drop, RAIN is not suitable for grids with its waypoint system. I think I’ll have to set up a system from scratch (heavens help me).
