[b38] Hexagonal grids!

[tiger_eye]

This addon will let you play b38 (whenever it comes out) in hex mode!

http://te4.org/games/addons/tome/hexagonal-grids

Feedback (including bugs and adulation) is most welcome.

Grids work as ASCII and graphical tiles:

[marvalis]

I think this is cool, just 'saying.

[getter77]

Yep, a cool thing---could especially make for more...understandable....flight paths for certain projectile spells in terms of targeting and whatnot.

[abstracted]

This is totally cool. More people should give it a go.

As getter77 said, this definitely improves paths of projectiles/spells, making them seem much more reasonable/logical, giving them a more polished feel. No more weird/awkward/broken "straight" lines that often happens with square grids.

Somehow, after playing in hex grids, going back to the square grids was unappealing, it just seemed basic and simple in comparison.

+1 should make it into the game.

A small suggestion, currently left/right keys (both the arrow keys & on the numpad) does this: ???? and ???? to simulate moving horizontally. The thing is, often when there is an adjacent enemy, let's say to the NW of me, I often hit the left key to attack it. What happens of course half the time is, I move SW instead, wasting a turn & taking damage. While the left key only did what it's supposed to do. (alternate moving NW/SW)

Would you say I just need to suck it up and get used to using diagonal direction keys on the numpad, or could a tweak in the function of left/right keys be a possibility?

[yufra]

+1 should make it into the game.

DG prefers the square grid, so don't hold your breath. This is why we have the addon system, though!

A small suggestion, currently left/right keys (both the arrow keys & on the numpad) does this: ???? and ???? to simulate moving horizontally. The thing is, often when there is an adjacent enemy, let's say to the NW of me, I often hit the left key to attack it. What happens of course half the time is, I move SW instead, wasting a turn & taking damage. While the left key only did what it's supposed to do. (alternate moving NW/SW)

Would you say I just need to suck it up and get used to using diagonal direction keys on the numpad, or could a tweak in the function of left/right keys be a possibility?

tiger_eye and I chatted about this when he was working on the zig-zag code. The problem is the ambiguity: do you want to attack or move past the NPC? I would propose a different behavior: do nothing if there is a hostile NPC in either of the positions. This forces the user to be clear about what they want, and avoids any "wait what?" moments from unexpected zig-zags.

[Grey]

Rebind to QWE/ASD and then you can play hex mode smoothly on laptops too :) The 4/6 zig-zag movement is pretty handy though.

[tiger_eye]

Thanks, abstracted! I need to play more so I too can try a game of ToME in hex

yufra is correct. A couple things about zig-zagging were kinda left unfinished. So, here is my list of things that could be improved for tome-hex:

(1) don't change zig-zag if the player didn't move. For example, if you bump-attacked an enemy with "4" (i.e., LEFT, but attacked to upper-left), then pressing 4 again will bump-attack again (instead of moving to the lower-left).

(2) perhaps disable player wall sliding when a hostile enemy is visible.

(3) bottom edge of map can get slightly cut-off.

(4) scroll the map up/down better. Right now, moving diagonally (1, 3, 7, 9) moves the character up or down half a tile-height, but sometimes the viewport scrolls the map a full tile-height.

(5) perhaps provide an option to enable/disable player wall sliding.

(6) perhaps provide an option to choose the tile width and height so it's not forced to use the correct hexagonal aspect ratio.

(7) doors of random town buildings don't always connect to the inside of the building.

I am interested to hear what else you and others think about tome-hex, and what else could be improved. Do you like the player wall-sliding? Does it always work as expected? Longer-term plans include to make the tiles (and targeting highlights, etc.) actually hexagonal shape, to create a Battle for Wesnoth tileset (which is hex) that any module can use, and to give the option to use the Wesnoth terrain tileset in ToME. The current zone generators could probably be improved in hex mode too, and it would be awesome if new hex-specific zone generators were created.