better hex coordinates
This post is about the notation system one uses for hexcrawls, so you probably know right away whether it's for you.
My personal problem with the standard method in all variations (flat or pointy tops, indexing at 00 or 01, CCRR or RRCC, etc) is that I can't easily tell whether two hexes are adjacent by looking at their coordinates, nor can I easily look at a hex's coordinates and know the coordinates of the adjacent hex in some desired direction. Typically the answer involves squinting at some kind of image representation, because I have to remember which column type juts up and which juts down, and even I, a freak with an Anki card to remember that odd columns jut up in Text Mapper/Hex Describe, struggle to get from there to remember if that means I need to adjust up or down.
I am also not that smart and struggle with the idea of further north being lower in number.
So:
- flat tops; hence, straight columns
- values count how far north, and how far east
- your row (northness) value is 2 less than the hex immediately north of you, and 2 greater than the hex immediately south of you
- columns are staggered, as usual for flat tops; however, their row values are also staggered by one, just as their height on the image is in-between the others
When I was formulating this I was not aware of Sam's domino hex flower but that may make the notation system here more intuitive! Imagine a rectangular grid with each square labelled with its x and y coordinates; now, imagine the squares grouped into pairs of dominoes tessellated in a way isomorphic to a hexmap.
This means that
- the hex to the north is always +2n, +0e
- the hex to the northeast is always +1n, +1e
- southeast -1n, +1e
- south -2n, +0e
- southwest -1n, -1e
- northwest +1n, -1e
The jumping by two does introduce some peculiarities, but fundamentally I find it much easier to work with top-down than left-right or god help me even-odd asymmetry, or whether going up in longitude means going north or incrementing the row value, or the like.
I'm agnostic on NNEE vs EENN because on the one hand, (Lat, Long); on the other, (x, y). I will leave that to wiser hands to settle.