Re: Multi-hex units

[Jens Granseuer <jensgr@gmx.net>]

On 19.10.2004 19:11, Patrick Forhan wrote:
> In the cool board game Heroscape, multi-hex units move in a way that the
> trailing hex simply follows the leading hex.  FWIW, it also allows either hex
> to be the leading or trailing at the start of movement.
>
> Graphically it may be a bit tricky, since you would have things turning.  Doing
> it smoothly would mean you'd need smooth rotations while things were shifting
> hexes.
It's the graphics part specifically that makes me wonder whether it's
such a good idea after all. Getting unit rotations is probably the easiest
part as there are even a number of SDL add-on libs dedicated to stuff like
that. As I see it, a much bigger obstacle is getting the movement shown
correctly. If you have a unit spanning more than one hex it will
automatically seem to march across adjacent hexes when taking a corner.
That's not such a big deal when those hexes are unoccupied and valid for
the unit to move onto. However, when there is another unit or a ship starts
surfing across coastal tiles it will just look very wrong.

To illustrate what I'm talking about, suppose we had square tiles:

|--|--|--|
|  |X |2 |
|--|--|--|
|0 |0 |1 |
|--|--|--|

Here, the two 0's are our twin-hex unit, X is an enemy unit, and
2 is the hex we want to move to (so that the unit occupies 2 and 1
after the move). How do you make that move without going across the
X square? You can't, unless you have a unit that can bend in the
middle (might work e.g. for trains but that's not what I had in mind
when talking about multi-hex units) or you take the "jumping" approach
from Battle Isle (ie. units are only shown when anchored to a hex, not
in between. In the example, this means the "animation" consists of
two frames, the first showing the unit at (0/1), and the second
being the final position at (2/1)).

The effect is not quite as bad for hexes as it is for squares, but
it's definitely there. And both of the solutions above don't look
desirable to me.

Jens