So I’m working on the visibility and mask of the game I wrote in the last two blog posts. Here’s a problem that I ran into right away and it involves not paying attention to detail. What I’m referring to here is the hex board layout. If you look at the documentation:
Battle Field One Specifications
You’ll see a page titled “Unit Movement” and at the bottom is the definition for finding the surrounding 6 cells. What I didn’t verify is that my game has the cells shifted the exact same way. You see, there are two different ways a hex-board can be drawn (actually there are rotated arrangements too, but I’m going to ignore that). If the first column is started lower than the second column , then it follows my specification. However, if you look at the actual game, you’ll see that I drew the map starting with the first column higher than the second column.
Old Documentation:
Game:
So that means that the game was designed wrong to begin with. Now the choice is to change the documentation and fix the calculations inside the game or change the game board and leave everything else clean.
I’m choosing to change the specification for the game and I’m going to have to fix the even/odd test inside version 1 to make sure I am searching the right surrounding cells. If you’re just downloading the specification, then you’ll noticed that it’s already been corrected.
These things happen and it’s fortunate that I was able to catch this before getting any deeper into the game code.