That’s No Moon
So here’s a screenshot of my miniLD-16 inspired project. This is mostly just my hexplanet demo with a new tileset drawn from the miniLD palette. I don’t really like the stripey pattern (unexplored land), I need to do something about that.
Hex Moon
Most of the work here isn’t visible in the screenshot — I ported the hex demo to OpenGL ES, using proper VBO’s and shaders instead of the immediate mode crap it was doing before. This screenshot isn’t running on the iPhone, but it could be. This is running on linux using the PVR SDK in OGLES emulation mode. I’m finding it to be a quite nice SDK, btw, if you’re doing any iPhone graphics stuff and you’re not using it, you’re missing out.
This will probably be my last screenshot of this as a mini-LD entry, and I might not get a chance to work on it much in the next few months as I’m trying to ship a completely different iPhone project but I do hope to get back to this one, I think it will be a lot of fun and worth finishing.
Definitely cool.
Wait… you can’t tessellate a sphere with regular hexagons! Is there a neat trick to how you got that to work?
I never let theoretical limitations of the universe get in the way of my games… heheh.. yes there is a trick. You cheat. Basically there are a few pentagons mixed in to get the tiling to work. You can get away with as few as 4 pentagons (use a tetrahedron as a base) but it gets kind of warped, I found that using 12 pentagons and the rest hexes gave a nice, even tiling.
I linked to my original demo in the last post:
http://www.vickijoel.org/hexplanet/
There’s a white paper on that page that explains how this works.
ps if you know a trick to get around the “hairy ball theorem” please let me know.
Thanks for going through the effort of writing the paper – very interesting.
Very nice, jovoc! I was playing around with exactly this idea last summer, while I was playing around with XNA…
(pic) http://geomys.com/planets/continents/pics/continents_3.jpg
I actually implemented class GeometricSolid with routines for generating basic triangular solids (tetra-, octa-, dodeca-, and icosahedron). The class had a MakeDual function on it, which would take whatever solid it was given and make the corresponding dual, so my hexes were actual geometry and could have been textured directly. (never put in textures, was just using colored polys)
There’s more screenshots and an installer of the demos here if anyone’s interested(XNA required)
ihttp://geomys.com/planets/continents/
This looks great! It’s really nice that you managed to creating a tiling that works over the whole sphere!