Outline Both Squares and Hexes

So I’ve been experimenting a lot lately with rendering lines on the ground, for the map in strategy and tactics games. Last post I already had this effect working for a square grid, but it wouldn’t work for hex grids because it was dependent on drawing pixels to match the grid. I ended that post by brainstorming ways to support hex grids, and have had great success working on the problem since then.

I uploaded a WebGL demo to try, and here’s a video showing the territory outlines shader working on both square and hex grids:

Shader that renders Border Outlines

Merry Almost-Christmas! I normally do a blog post every month on the 25th, but I wanted to do this one a few days before then because of the holidays.

Last month I had described my plan to render border lines on the ground (think territory in a strategy game, or movement ranges for tactics games). Here’s an image showing the result of my experimentation:

Hey, looks pretty good if I do say so myself! That’s a smoothly glowing outline drawn on the ground, surrounding a discrete region of a square grid, with the outline nicely rounded at the corners.

Border Lines on a Strategy Map

Happy Thanksgiving!

A couple months ago I was noodling on techniques for displaying the map in a strategy or tactics game. Well, lately I’ve been thinking a lot about one specific aspect of how those maps work: representing borders on the map.

I’m talking about the colored lines on the ground in this screenshot:

In which I discovered Roll-and-Write games…

A fairly brief and text-only update this month. The main thing I want to share is a kind of game called “roll-and-write“. But before I discuss that more, I should announce that I started a new job! I’m taking charge of the Unity-side of AR projects at BUNDLAR.

Demonstration of Map Mesh

Last month I described in words how I was building a clickable map using vertex colors. Well, a reader requested I make some visuals to demonstrate what I was talking about, so I whipped up a demo in Unity and grabbed a video of my screen:

Visual tricks for a strategy game’s map

At work this past month I’ve been implementing some interesting visual tricks on a mesh-based map. While we aren’t making a game, I could totally imagine these techniques being useful for a strategy game, or maybe a tactical RPG. Let’s say you have a hex map. Well, you could easily do hexagons with a 3D mesh, and then boom you can can use all sorts of visual tricks developed for 3D games.

Multiplayer with Web Sockets

Still haven’t had much to blog about lately, so this may be a short post. I didn’t even make a post last month, but there were a couple interesting new techniques I’ve been mastering since my last post. One is using the stencil buffer in custom shaders, and the other is using web sockets to implement multiplayer.