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:

• Eric Lippert for providing the original Shadowcasting implementation, and inspiring me with his rectangular A* path-finding algorithm;
• Wim Pijls & Henk Post for Yet Another Bidirectional Algorithm for Shortest Paths;
• Luis Henrique Oliveira Rios & Luiz Chaimowicz for PNBA{"*"} - A Parallel Bidirectional Heuristic Search Algorithm;
• Andrew V. Goldberg & Renato F. Werneck for Computing Point-to-Point Shortest Paths from External Memory, (the explanation of ALT that finally stuck.)