Overview

This write up details a dual grid approach to creating hex based worlds. It was originally pitched to support world map generation for a 4x game. This document covers 3 main sections:

• The Dual Grid tiles and the art pipeline used to create them.
• The map generation tooling that allows designers to create world “presets”.
• The landscape engine that manages and renders the dual grid tiles in Unreal Engine 5.

Who made this?

Steph J Paul was responsible for the idea, and created all art implementations.

Emi Storrs wrote landscape engine and map generation tooling.

What is a dual grid?

A dual grid is when the grid that you place terrain meshes or tiles is offset (and in our case a different shape) than the gameplay grid. They line up mathematically and allow you to create smoother more natural tiles in the terrain with a lower number of tiles/assets.

Map generation

Map generation run through a configurable pipeline of discreet steps that shaped a shared state. There were a couple key constraints on the generation:

• No sub-hex data. The finest granularity was a single main-grid hex.
• Deterministic. When given a seed, and a configuration the generation had to return the same map every time.
• Configurable. This was built to generate different maps for a 4X game, so it needed to be tweaked by designers and players.

Mapgen Tool

To facilitate the development of the pipeline and the creation of configurations, a Map Generation Tool was created that used the same pipeline to generate near real time previews of the various steps in the pipeline.