Matrix Games Forums

Something I have wondered about from release is why are the map hexes shorter in the East-West direction than the North-South Direction?

The result is the map is warped and comparisons about any kind of operation between a north-south axis and a east-west axis is difficult to judge unless one tediously counts hexes.

See the attached image. The distance in hexes from Vinnitsa to Odessa is 19 hexes. Then check the distance from Vinnitsa in a easterly direction for 19 hexes. The line is appreciably shorter. The true length of the eastern line is transposed on to the Odessa line. See the difference?

This makes no difference to anything the game does, as it counts hexes, not distance. But a human looking at a map naturally judges distance between nodes by true distance on a flat plane. The effect of this 'warping' is that objectives that are some distance apart in a north-south line are actually closer than what you might at first perceive from simply looking at the map. You need to count hexes.

Not wanting to be overly critical here as I don't have any insight in to the technical difficulties encountered by the devs. However I have played plenty of hex based PC games where the hexes are perfectly symmetrical. So why not for WITE?

I am hopeful this glitch is fixed in WITW.

The error is in the range of 10%.

Might be your monitor? Mine too, but open in window mode and you can stretch the map L to R and resize the hexes.

Edit: Oh no you can't, they ping back to asymetrical.

Yep, I noticed this a long time ago, and is very apparent in their full Europe map. I believe it has purpose though, and isn't something willy-nilly.

Spherical surface to flat projections always involve distortions, fun fun fun.

Try measuring the distances on the surface of a good quality globe using a bit of thread and a known scale, (hopefully printed on the globe itself). See what you get.

Yes I am very aware of map projections, I work in that field. But hexes don't need to be distorted.

So, you've already done the coordinate transformation from lat and long to sphercial and crosschecked the actual distances across the surface of the Earth to the game scale hexes ?

Or are you expecting someone else to do it, possibly again ?

You know what, the map is perfectly fine. I have no idea what I am talking about. My degree in spatial science is worthless.

ORIGINAL: Michael T

Yes I am very aware of map projections, I work in that field. But hexes don't need to be distorted.

If this results in a correct Mercator projection with correct (average) east-west distances, why not? And, if you look carefully to a hex you see the smaller east-west cross-section in relation to its north-south cross-section.

Aw shucks, we play on 2D projections of a 3D world. Next iteration of game code should reflect no hexes of any shape, appearance compensated for 2D/3D distortions and completely free-form unit positions, command alignments, 3D projections at all scales, etc.

You know, it could be possible that the whole thing is that the original hex used to build the map was skewed . . .

I created my own version of the map with nice symmetrical hexes. So problem solved.

How did you do that? Create a new map?

Interesting point about this: there is a process to map the whole Earth (less the poles) in a number of equal-area hexagons - that's similar to how one maps a soccer ball in a regular pentagonal+hexagonal pattern.

So that's an equal-area, equidistant global mapping. Problem is that your latitudes are no longer parallel (bugger) and the longitudes have an odd shape, so it is non-azimuthal, and for some reason it's not conformal too, but I fail to see why.