[RELEASED] Hexasphere Grid System by Kronnect

Hi everyone!

Happy to announce Hexasphere Grid System has just landed on the Asset Store.

Hexasphere Grid System is a high performance spherical grid system. It leverages texture arrays and geometry shaders to provide optimal generation and runtime performance allowing hundreds of thousands of tiles.

Intro:

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Features:

• Wireframe, Shaded and combined styles (shaded + wireframe). The wireframe mode culls backside wires reducing vertex count.
• Per tile color and texture. Instantly change or assign your own textures to any number of cells.
• Extrusion with customizable height and gradient colors. Change any number of cells heights at any time.
• Interactive: highlight tiles with cursor, drag/rotate and zoom sphere, fly to a given tile.
• Fast and easy to use path-finding functions to get the optimal path between any two tiles.
• HeightMap texture support. Ability to load heightmap texture files at runtime.
• Full source code included (C#).
• Demo scene and easy to read API reference guide included.

Hexasphere Grid System has been built on the experience and feedback from previous grid assets like Terrain Grid System and Grids 2D and is designed to be easily integrated or used in your project. Adding an hexasphere is as easy as clicking top menu GameObject -> 3D -> Hexasphere, then customize its appearance and behaviour using the custom inspector.

Hexasphere Grid System on the Asset Store

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Nice post from @Tinjaw on building a game with Hexasphere Grid System. Read it here:
https://tinjaw.com/2017/06/14/building-a-simple-game-in-unity-with-hexasphere/

 

Version 1.5 is now available with some fixes and new API additions:

- API: Added GetTileAtLocalPos, SetTileTextureRotation, GetTileTextureRotation, GetTileWorldSpaceVertex
- [Fix] Fixed iOS compatibility issues
- [Fix] Fixed textures vertical orientation

 

Hmm how comes I have been searching for a hexasphere asset for ages and could not find it!
But a small question, were you able to work around and make this a full hexasphere or does it have the classical 12 pentagons in it ?

Edit: Re-read the description and the fact there are 12 polys is explicited, so my search continues (I know that mathematically it is not possible to have an all around hexasphere but I'm looking for an asset which implements something like platonic solids or semi-regular polyhedrons or even directly Healpix or GLESP, otherwise I'll have to get on the task some day :/)

 

Hi,

Yes, a perfect hexasphere is not possible in 3D. You could look for other approaches that don't use hexagons or use disconnected tiles (by reducing hexagons in place and distorting the grid you could perhaps approximate that, but the result can be odd and much less performant since you will have lot of repeated edges - they won't be shared among neighbour tiles as in Hexasphere).

However, in Hexasphere the 12 pentagons can be easily overlooked if you produce lot of tiles (they're fully functional as hexagons though).

Regards.

 

Version 3.0 now available:

Changes:
- New Grid Editor: allows tile customization in Scene View at Editor time
- New Wireframe options (extruded mode only): color from tile, color intensity
- Cells can be grouped to define different path-finding masks
- API: New CellSetGroup / CellGetGroup

And a video of a new demo scene included:

 

Hello, just purchased it, looks good !

@Thrawn75
Do you think you could implement a simple lod system ? Just changing the subdivision count and efficiently rebuilding the sphere with currently loaded data, either live when switching the subdivision or storing disabled lod gameobjects.

 

Hi, thanks for purchasing.

With “loaded data”’ do you mean assigned cell colours or textures?

 

Yes !

 

New feature coming... Smart Edges!

 

Added better shading and self-shadows in upcoming 4.2:

 

New bevel option in next v3.4 update:

 

Hi,
i just don't see any colors on the tiles, they are all grey in the demo scenes. Using Unity 2019.3.9f1 am i missing something here?

 

Which rendering pipeline are you using, Builtin or URP?

 

Grab latest version. It includes support for latest Unity version and also a fix for bevel style in URP.

 

We made a new intro video to better show what you get with this asset: