(no title)
frading | 1 year ago
It's more that black and white colors don't apply anymore in a grid like this. Since there will be places where more than 4 tiles can share a same corner, you need more than 2 colors.
So here, colors are only used for cosmetic reason, to differentiate the tiles from one another.
That said, I've tried to keep the essence of classic chess where I could. And it's totally possible on the sides of the board, where it's guarantied to always have 8 tiles touching a side with a full edge. So for those, I'm alternating white/black and positioning the king and queen on the expected colors.
But as soon as there is a corner with more (or less) than 4 tiles, the color assignment needs to adapt and that trickles down to the rest of the board. So in most boards, I need 3 or 4 colors, and in some cases I need 5 (but maybe my algo could be improved to limit that number).
> The corners with 3 and 5 neighbour have a special mark. What does that mean?
The red marks (which I call red wall) highlight where only 3 tiles are connected. And the blue ones (which I call blue pivots) highlight where it's 5, or even 6. They each generate different strategies.
For the red wall, each tile that is touching it has a missing diagonal. So it acts like a wall, especially for the bishop and queen, but also the pawn. This wall can be great for defense. Or for rooks, this can be great for attack, as you can target 2 parallel lines from there [1]
For the blue pivots, you have the opposite, as you have more than 1 diagonal. So if you have a bishop, it can go in 2 directions from this corner.
I invite you to try the tutorial that opens up when you load the demo, it has a couple steps which illustrate those. Or maybe you have gone through it, and it's not clear enough? I'd be very happy to hear any feedback on this. I have a feeling this info could be more obvious, and that may not be the case yet.
And for the board generation, I'm completely open about it. It's actually inspired by a game called Townscaper, and the author generously shared how he made it. I'm merely running with it.
I've just written this short explanation on r/proceduralgeneration [2], which I'm copying it here:
-------
The game is built using Threejs, Vuejs, and Polygonjs (my own 3D engine based on threejs). You can see examples of scenes where this type of grid is created [3] and the core library is open source here [4]
You can also see the code for the most important node, called quadrangulate [5] In short, it takes a bunch of triangles, and convert them to quads by grouping them in pairs.
This conversion is straightforward when the triangles are neatly aligned and you process them in order, and the output would then be a very regular grid. But if you process them out of order, you will en up with isolated triangles that have no more neighbouring triangles. Those can't be converted to a quad. But if you subdivide the whole thing, you then get an irregular grid like the one above.
-------
What I forgot to mention is that after the subdivision, you may also need to apply a smoothing, or squarification, where you iterate several times of the whole grid to transform the tiles from a rhombus to be more like squares.
And you're absolutely right, I should do a blog post about it. It's a question that comes up very often as well, it could do with a central place. And I'd love to see more people using this system, as interesting mechanics emerge from it.
[1] https://x.com/fradingue/status/1796892307523830068/photo/2
[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/proceduralgeneration/comments/1d5np...
[3] https://polygonjs.com/gui/irregular_quad_relaxation/edit
[4] https://github.com/polygonjs/polygonjs
[5] https://github.com/polygonjs/polygonjs/blob/master/src/engin...
gus_massa|1 year ago
4 should be enough https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_color_theorem, but the alternating color in the border may be a problem. It's an interesting variant for nerdsniping. I guess it's possible to find a 4 color version but it may need too much backtraking.
---
> I invite you to try the tutorial that opens up when you load the demo
I didn't notice. It's linked at the top. You may add another link at the bottom for people like me that skip the headers. I'll try later.
---
About the new strategies, in human vs computer the knight forks are probably more OP than a bunch of blinkstackers with infinite APM. I'd trade a rock or even a queen for a knight just to give my brain some rest.
frading|1 year ago
For the demo, it actually opens up when you start the game. But it's possible to skip it, which is totally fair, I should have expected that. I'll make the button more obvious, you're absolutely right that it's too hidden at the moment.
> knight forks are probably more OP than a bunch of blinkstackers with infinite APM
There are too many words I don't understand here to infer your meaning. The knight forks I know are when a knight threatens the king and another piece, but it looks like you mean something else. It could be related to what I mentioned with multiple diagonals, although that does not affect knights. And OP is probably not original poster. And I don't know what bindstackers or APM are (maybe Actions Per Minute?).
But it does look like you know more about chess than I do, so I'd love to absorb that knowledge.