[MUD-Dev] Re: Hex-grid mapping

[Alberto Barsella]

On Tue, 1 Dec 1998, Ling wrote:

> On an unrelated note, has anyone got any bright ideas on representing a
> sphere with roughly equal shaped tiles?  Whereby tiles can be a hex or
> otherwise.  A requirement is that the solution can be scalable for
> different sized spheres for representing something like a moon and then a
> large planet.

Check the books about computer graphics and the polygonalization of
spheres. If triangular tiles are ok for you it's simple to write a
recursive triangularization routine. I think I even did it some time ago,
but I have no idea where the code might be buried now.
You usually start with an octahedron (or tetrahedron) and then you split
every face into 4 triangles using midpoint split of edges and
renormalization.
I don't know if there is any clever way to label the tiles which gives
you a simple formula for distance calculations, etc.

Hope this helps,
Alberto