This page brings back memories: Back in high school, I spent a few slow weeks in the back row of Physics class planning and working out some of the math behind

This page brings back memories: Back in high school, I spent a few slow weeks in the back row of Physics class planning and working out some of the math behind a Military Madness/Nectaris clone for the TI-84+. I wasn't as clever as the people mentioned in the article, so I came up with a bog-standard "offset coordinates" system, with the flat-topped hexes and a rectangular map stolen from Military Madness. Unfortunately, I never got around to programming it, because I realized early on that it would be really hard to fit a legible interface onto a 96x64 monochrome display. You either use small hexes with almost no room for actual graphics, or large hexes that fill up too much of the screen to give an effective view of the battlefield. Not to mention, lacking color or even shading would make it really hard to differentiate terrain, show which hex was selected, etc. What I wasn't aware of at the time was that a lot of other strategy games from the 80s and early 90s (including the Game Boy port of Nectaris, which had to work around the limitations of a 160x144 4-shades-of-pea-soup greenscale display) used hex grids for gameplay, but displayed them as grids of staggered squares or tall rectangles. This made the graphics code (especially on tile based systems) much simpler, and gave artists a lot more room to fit legible graphics into, at a cost to the amount of hexes you could pack onto a screen. Examples: http://youtu.be/iWra6nvKvok?t=1m13s http://youtu.be/iWra6nvKvok?t=1m13s http://youtu.be/sTV06jd9j3A?t=7m21s http://youtu.be/sTV06jd9j3A?t=7m21s You could fit about 40 full 12x12 tiles onto the 83's display, and that just might be enough space for some primitive programmer art tanks and soldiers. Or, maybe plain ASCII would have been even more legible. The 83's built-in 6x8 font would have allowed me to fit about 120 full tiles on screen, more than enough to get a decent view of the battlefield. Damn, if had known about those games at the time, I might have actually stuck with the project... or at least, long enough to get stuck on figuring out how to implement a decent AI... But enough of my rambling. This is an excellent resource, of the interesting and useful but very accessible kind the world needs more of desperately. It'd be interesting to read the author's thoughts on these "rectangular hex grid" systems; obviously, none of the internal data structures or algorithms change, but it does seem to be a bit simpler (under an offset coordinates system, at least) to convert between grid and pixel coordinates, to calculate how many tiles can be fit on screen, etc.