Using a bitmask for hexagon connections?

On a map made up of hexagons I would like to put sprites on cells when there is a road, indicating this cell is connected to one or more of its neighbor cells. For the individual sprites I would like to set up prefabs for each possible variant.

Now, rather than set up six different (60° rotated) variants for each possible connection variation I would like to use something like a bitmask do reduce some of the workload.


For example, a connection from North East to South East would have the first and third bit set (000101).

Here comes the tricky part - when looking up prefabs, I would like to loop through all these and find the prefab that matches the variant but not necessarily the rotation, so instead of having to set up a prefab with a bitmask of 101000 I want to find the tile that matches the bitmask shifted to whichever position (000101,001010, 010100 and so on) and rotate its SpriteRenderer accordingly.

As far as I understand bitmask are always 32 bits in length so I suppose this is not possible out-of-the-box? And if it was, how can I shift a whole bitmask, and will it "wrap"?

Is there another way to solve this in a similar manner?

 

You can do this with uint as described here: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/812022/c-sharp-bitwise-rotate-left-and-rotate-right

 

Just on the subject of hexagons, I always like to post this guy's work:

Hexagonal maps (hexmaps):

https://www.redblobgames.com/grids/hexagons/

You can certainly use bitmasks for what you're accomplishing above, but in today's ultra-fast CPU world, unless you are literally making millions of map cells all at once, you probably could get plenty of performance by using some type of binary-digits-in-a-string descriptor, like "000101"

I would actually prerotate the six possibilities and inject them into a Dictionary that contained a link to the prefab that has those rotations and what rotation (0 to 5) it would be to make it match.

Such as:

"000101" would be prefab X rotation 0

"001010" would be prefab X rotation 1

"101000" would be prefab X rotation 3

etc.

Jam those into a Dictionary and look 'em up by string, super-fast and far easier to debug than printing bits out.

 

Ohhhh, now that is a pretty neat idea! Thanks for the suggestion.