From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: (qmail 13764 invoked by alias); 21 Nov 2003 04:17:38 -0000 Mailing-List: contact xconq7-help@sources.redhat.com; run by ezmlm Precedence: bulk List-Subscribe: List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: , Sender: xconq7-owner@sources.redhat.com Received: (qmail 13756 invoked from network); 21 Nov 2003 04:17:38 -0000 Received: from unknown (HELO mail-out4.apple.com) (17.254.13.23) by sources.redhat.com with SMTP; 21 Nov 2003 04:17:38 -0000 Received: from mailgate1.apple.com (a17-128-100-225.apple.com [17.128.100.225]) by mail-out4.apple.com (8.12.10/8.12.9) with ESMTP id hAL4Hbnc016094 for ; Thu, 20 Nov 2003 20:17:37 -0800 (PST) Received: from scv1.apple.com (scv1.apple.com) by mailgate1.apple.com (Content Technologies SMTPRS 4.2.1) with ESMTP id ; Thu, 20 Nov 2003 20:17:37 -0800 Received: from apple.com ([17.112.76.143]) by scv1.apple.com (8.12.9/8.12.9) with ESMTP id hAL4H4ww003255; Thu, 20 Nov 2003 20:17:05 -0800 (PST) Message-ID: <3FBD91E2.40301@apple.com> Date: Fri, 21 Nov 2003 06:58:00 -0000 From: Stan Shebs User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X Mach-O; en-US; rv:1.4) Gecko/20030624 X-Accept-Language: en-us, en MIME-Version: 1.0 To: Jakob Ilves CC: xconq7 Subject: Re: Non flat maps (use pentagons and septagons on maps) References: <20031120173747.55020.qmail@web40903.mail.yahoo.com> In-Reply-To: <20031120173747.55020.qmail@web40903.mail.yahoo.com> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-SW-Source: 2003/txt/msg00889.txt.bz2 Jakob Ilves wrote: >Hello! > >The orbiter is back, and in this email I'm considering to take a trip to the moon... And you are >welcome to join me on the ride... > >One thing I've been tinkering with on paper and in Java for approx 10-12 years is to let strategy >games take place not only on a flat hexagon playfield but upon a playfield where you have >occasional pentagons and septagons thrown in. > Heh, not to be discouraging or anything, but I used up a bunch of dead trees sketching out hex sphere algorithms around 1995, finally gave up. Executive summary is that it's messy for geometry calculations (how units are nearby?), messy for graphics (although 3D hw changes the difficulty), and messy for AI. I then decided it was intrinsically out of scope for Xconq, and went on to the next knotty problem. :-) Ironically, the most plausible model was a pair of hemispheres; while things are weird all along the seam, at least they're consistently weird, and the player can plan for it. Stan