🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <71405@hydra.gatech.EDU>, ccastej@prism.gatech.EDU (Eric Jensen) writes:
> I am writing a tactical wargame in C++, and I was wondering 
> what people's experiences with hex-maps vs. square-based maps 
> have been.

You'll be best off doing one of two things.  If you use square cells, you
will want to do sub-cell positioning.  Otherwise you will want to use hexes.
Movement on squares will be more even (no distance advantage to moving
diagonally), but some games don't lend themselves to the sub-cell position
technique.  Tactical games tend to be the sort where only one unit can 
occupy a cell, so sub-cell positioning gets tricky because you would then
need to track sizes and proximity on a much finer level.

Some time soon the net will be seeing ComSim, a game that's been under 
development since the first of '89 and active use/testing for about a year
and a half.  It's a military combat simulator that uses square map cells and
floating point unit locations.  The floating point was sort of dictated by
some non-obvious design decisions, and has worked out quite well.  Here's
a quick rundown of features for those interested:

	X and Motif based (can be played with no keyboard usage)
	Realtime
	Complex instruction set can be used to set actions for each unit
	Multi-player, players may disconnect and reconnect leaving units live
	Some unit types can hold others (to several layers)
	User specifiable and definable set of units/cities
	"cron"able, can save and restore based on time
	Multiple alliance levels
	Private and public text messages
	Built-in help system

A new release has just been made to the "testing team", so with a bit of luck
it will go to one of the sources groups within a month or so.  Some friends
of mine at HP have taken over most of the updating and maintainance while
I have been netless for most of the past year.

As a quick example of what you can do with the point-n-click instructions,
you can set a city up to create bombers and forward them to a waiting
aircraft carrier which refuels them and sends them on to attack an enemy
city.  You can also set up patrol loops, select run/ignore/attack when enemy
units are sighted, and a bunch of other nifty things.

Start sending me hate mail if it hasn't shown up on the net by Dec 1. :^)

John Olsen
olsen_jo@uvadm.uvcc.edu