/HexGridUtilitiesForGames

Hex-grid utilities for board and strategy games with path-finding, field-of-view, and more

Primary LanguageC#MIT LicenseMIT

HexGridUtilitiesForGames

Hex Grid Utilities for Board-Game Development in C#

A tool-kit of utilities for building board- and strategy-games on a hexagonal grid, providing these features:

  • Lightning-fast ALT Bidirectional Path-Finding implementation;
    • Default landmarks are the 4 corners and 4 side midpoints of the map
    • To/from distances for all landmarks pre-computed on load using Dijkstra's agorithm
  • Fast Shadowcasting implementation provides 3D Field-of-View;
    • optionally supports automatic visibility limiting due to Earth's curvature.
  • Board storage as either a flat or blocked (providing better localization) array;
  • Hexagonal grid with coordinates
    • Hex-picking (identifying the hex selected by the user);
    • All internal calculations performed with integer canonical (obtuse) coordinates;
    • All external interfaces and board storage erformed with user (standard rectangular) coordinates;
    • Built-in support for non-standard & transformed coordinate systems (such as for multi-map boards);
    • Automatic internal conversion between coordinate systems hidden in a single type HexCoords;
  • WinForms Panel sub-class exposing all of the above plus:
    • Mouse-wheel zoom and scroll; and
    • Map transposition

Structure

  • HexUtilitites: The core library with all functionality not dependent on either WinForms or WPF. THis library is moderatey to extremely stable at the present time.

  • HexgridPanel: All core functionality depending on either WinForms or WPF. THis library is undergoing revision currently that may include breaking changes.

  • HexgridExamplesCommon: Common structures used by the example libraries below.

  • HexgridExampleWinform: An example MDI WInForm that opens two windows (forms) based around HexgridPanel (terrible performance) and HexgridBufferedPanel (moderately good performance). Planned:

    • Example based around a 5-layer buffered & cached subclass of HexgridPanel (HexgridCachedPanel - from proprietary code) that offers excellent performance even on maps very much larger than the examples.

  • HexgridExampleWpf: A WPF example that opens two windows (forms) based around HexgridPanel (terrible performance) and HexgridBufferedPanel (moderately good performance). Once HexgridCachedPanel is complete an example based around it will also be added.

  • HexgridExampleWinformw: Work in progress.

External Documentation

Doxygen is used to generate external documentation for the entire solution, including diagrams using Graphviz DOT, in the file docs.zip. I endeavour to update this on every push to GitHub - but it is not yet automated.

References:

Many thanks to: