[RFD] Triangular or rectangular tiles

Hyronymus · Post by **Hyronymus** » 29 Jan 2005 22:38

I haven't got expertise on this and I know it has been discussed before. In the FRD however there's no conclusion yet. We surely need to reach one though. From what I've read by others sofar triangular squares seems to offer the most. Correct me if I'm wrong.

Arathorn · Post by **Arathorn** » 29 Jan 2005 22:54

I have no expertise in this either, but I believe to remember from the discussion done about it ages ago that triangles give us more landscape forming ability, but are harder to code, is that right?

Hyronymus · Post by **Hyronymus** » 29 Jan 2005 22:59

That's in my memory too. Can anyone with expertise comment perhaps?

Hellfire · Post by **Hellfire** » 30 Jan 2005 00:54

*cough*
*cough*

Whew... That's a nasty cold coming...

Oooh.. And there's a proof of concept here.

Steve · Post by **Steve** » 30 Jan 2005 11:53

I'm still wondering if we should restrict ourselves to a grid so much. If tracks are going to be 360 degree, i'd hope roads would be too, which means buildings would need to be. Would make everything look nicer.. but then again, i won't be the one programming it

Zuu · Post by **Zuu** » 30 Jan 2005 12:14

Eaven trought we might hide the cells for users like Steve,

we still have to use them internally. So basicly with 360 degrees of freedome for tracks, roads, buildings etc, you can place stuff anywere on the cells, and with grafix that don't show them Steve won't notice them. But when adding some restrictions to placement of buildings and tracks I will be plesent too.

Steve, you might want to give an example on a game that don't use cells internally.

I am sure RRT use some sort of cells, but does not visuualy display them.

Rectangels or triangles? As user I don't really care. As programmer i don't realy care either. But the if rectangles are easier why not use them?

Steve · Post by **Steve** » 30 Jan 2005 15:53

Well, tiles suggests to me something big that'd you put an entire building on. The smallest units should be in a rectange pattern as that's the easiest to work with and advantages of triangles would be negible.

PJayTycy · Post by **PJayTycy** » 30 Jan 2005 17:59

I often tried to find a track system aligned to triangles myself, and never found something I liked. I will certainly have a closer look to uzurpator's sytsem.

The main problem I always had, was that a 90° turn for example, always looked different, depending on where exactly you started it (triangle top or middle of a side).

So, I am more a proponent of a square cell aproach for the simplicity, but if triangles really have a benefit, I'm all for it.

As a side note, especially to Steve, just to show you even Railroad Tycoon 3 uses a grid. It even uses 3 different grids. See the attached picture:

The red (big) cells are economical cells. You transport cargo between those cells. Station catchment area is also (based on size of the station) either a 2*2, 3*3 or 5*5 region of such big cells.
The smaller blue cells are the ones used for the landscape. Each of the corners has a certain height, the middle of the cell uses the average of the 4 heights, then 4 triangles are drawn with the top at the center of the cell.
The smallest units, used for everything you want to place on the ground (tracks, buildings,...) are not shown. From empirical testing, I can only guess 1 blue cell has 16*16 of these smaller units. A typical house uses 8*8 of them, a track section is about 8 units long and 5 units wide.

Steve · Post by **Steve** » 30 Jan 2005 19:34

That system sounds fine. Are the houses restricted to being aligned with the grid? Although that's not a major problem, as we can just make triangular houses on the grid and fill in gaps and make big pavements and such.

Hyronymus · Post by **Hyronymus** » 30 Jan 2005 19:42

Nice contributions, Pjaytycy and Hellfire. So triangular cells are favoured by the majority if I summarize properly?

jfs · Post by **jfs** » 30 Jan 2005 22:03

I'm not sure if having triangles would be better.
It does offer some more interesting track configurations, but it's different from what pretty much everyone else does. What I mean is that it might confuse too much.
Still, I think it's interesting enough to do it.

But it also brings another question, the shame of the map. With triangular tiles, really rectangular maps aren't possible (two of the edges would always be jagged), while triangular or hexagonal maps would be more "natural".
I'll make a new thread on this.

Post by **uzurpator** » 30 Jan 2005 22:46

Does it _really_ matter?

We can make a very fine rectangular grid. We can make gridless even.

I for one am for rectangular - but simply because they are the simplest to implement. I say - the first one to produce a working terrain proto will define what cells we will use.

jfs · Post by **jfs** » 31 Jan 2005 04:10

uzurpator wrote:I say - the first one to produce a working terrain proto will define what cells we will use.

That's not really useful for writing a Design Document. I'm pretty sure we decided to let every decision be made before any code.

Hyronymus · Post by **Hyronymus** » 08 Feb 2005 16:13

Let's play the devil's advocate here, I think this is quite an important issue. With triangular tiles we can't get clear-cut map shapes which made me realize that all current games that simulate landscapes must use rectangular tiles (SimCity, RRT3, Locomotion). Uzurpator, you are a great supporter of rectangular track. Will we be able to have smooth hills that don't look the same everywhere as in TTD if we go rectangular?

Post by **uzurpator** » 08 Feb 2005 17:00

Hyro - what tiles do you think my terrain proto uses?

jfs · Post by **jfs** » 08 Feb 2005 18:13

I think I've pointed to this before, one game I know that's using a triangle-based map is S2 (The Settlers 2.) It works quite well there, and even has a "round" world, though it's only for looks. Afaik. you can't actually "walk around the world".
The height of the landscape in S2 is stored per corner, and there are afaik. no limits on the max. difference between two adjecant corners. The edges are somewhat smoothed out, and the landscapes appear very nice.
Roads in S2 are built along the edges of the triangles, and buildings are built on corners. (Most buildings also "occupy" some of the adjecant corners, sometimes also those "two edges away".) Buildings require mostly flat land to be built, so if one tries to build them on very hilly land, the land is smoothed out. (That's the only way to modify the landscape during the game.)

I can try to find/make some screenshots if anyone are interested.

Arathorn · Post by **Arathorn** » 09 Feb 2005 11:46

Yes a screenshot would be nice.

Hyronymus · Post by **Hyronymus** » 09 Feb 2005 14:17

Oskar (eis_os) asked me to post these links to show the beauties of triangular terrain:

Open Source Settlers 2

PJayTycy · Post by **PJayTycy** » 09 Feb 2005 15:07

Hyronymus wrote:Oskar (eis_os) asked me to post these links to show the beauties of triangular terrain:

Open Source Settlers 2

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Hellfire · Post by **Hellfire** » 09 Feb 2005 15:13

Just click reload a few times. I managed to view the screenshots there.

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[RFD] Triangular or rectangular tiles

[RFD] Triangular or rectangular tiles

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