I worked some more on the “Old School Hex Mapper” I mentioned before (2007-06-02 Hex Mapping). It does roads! Well, it does them in a crummy way. Basically there’s a road-segment connecting the center of a hex with the edge, which I then copy, rotate, and translate as necessary.
Check out this map with a road. (You need a SVG enabled browser.)
Notice how the ASCII input starts to show limitations when there are more possiblities. Look at this unintended (?) three-way crossing near the city.
three-way crossing near the city
The ugly part is that the roads go right through the icons. In fact, they have to, because every road segment has one of its ends in the center of the hex.
So that’s what I’ll try to work on next. I think what I’ll do is have four road tiles, one connecting two adjacent sides (60°), one connecting roads at an angle (120°), and one connecting two opposite sides (180°). Then I can have the connecting parts avoid the center of the hex.
And I’ll get rid of extra three-way crossings near cities and towns. That should be easy to do.
In the mean time, feel free to experiment:
http://www.emacswiki.org/cgi-bin/old-school-hex
http://www.emacswiki.org/scripts/old-school-hex
To be honest, I still don’t know whether this is worth pursuing. My hand-drawn hex maps look much better! (My players are not supposed to click the link. 😄)
#Software #Graphics #Pictures #Maps #Hex #RPG
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I think I’ve worked myself into a dead end, here. Before doing any more development, I should do the following:
1. Use a hex tile centered on (0,0) in order to facilitate any rotations.
2. Use a coordinate system with an y axis slanted by 60° instead of the zig-zag I’m currently using in order to facilitiate lookup operations when working on roads.
3. Split it up in decent subroutines.
I quite like the three-way crossing you’ve got there. It’s unusual features like this which make for good maps, to my mind. After all if it’s like that, there must be a reason 😄
Perhaps a lord’s castle is at one of the crossing points and the city is:
1. abandoned and/or haunted
2. of a different race (dwarven miners?)
3. in a different country - the road follows the boundary
Alternatively, maybe the other road leading north from the hills is an Old Road, and largely unused now due to bandits/goblin raiders/lizardkin/whatever. ie, it’s a dangerous route which the players will (innevitably) take 😄
– GreyWulf 2007-06-08 09:56 UTC
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Interesting perspective. 😄 I was planning on trying to avoid three way crossings in the immediate vicinities of settlements. That’s feasible with a bit of extra coding without requiring too much intelligence built into the system. Thus, if there’s at least one other segment between the crossing and the settlement, we still get three way crossings. Or at least I hope we do.
I’m half way through my rewrite of the code. It uses – God forbid! – objects in Perl! 😄
– Alex Schroeder 2007-06-08 11:40 UTC