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Comment by kevindamm | Hacker News Reader

Ah, redblobgames! I remember their hexagonal coordinate system post from many years ago:

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

An excellent example of their more interactive posts and great for those interested in hex-grid rendering and navigating.

edit: wow, over 10 years ago and the content has been updated but the look and feel is much as I remember it. This was before reactive systems took over the web, too, so the 'toggle selection here, see updates everywhere' was quite notable for the time.

On the actual topic of the post.. I think flow fields easily get overshadowed by waypoints and other hierarchical approaches. Or, folded into the heuristic function for A*.

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Thanks! Yes, I've been making interactive diagrams for a long time. I wrote about my motivation in 2007 [1]. In the early 2000s it was Java applets, and then I switched to Flash applets, and then HTML5 in 2011. That was also around the time I ran out of disk space on my stanford site (they give me 100MB) so I bought a domain name, redblobgames.com. That was also around the time there was enough cross-browser support for me to switch to HTML5. And then in 2014 Bret Victor wrote about "explorable explanations" — that's when I felt like I wasn't alone in wanting this type of thing.

[1] https://simblob.blogspot.com/2007/07/interactive-illustratio...

Would just like to thank you for having an interactive site that runs fast on my Pinephone despite its lackluster SOC. Checking the weather ended up giving Mozilla an automated crash report this morning....

You're welcome! I try to keep the pages fast loading with minimal dependencies but have varying success depending on the needs of each page.

I was looking at that exact post yesterday - I'm currently working on implementing a board game that uses a hex grid, so it should be very useful, particularly the info on coordinate systems and finding neighbors/distances.

The interactive diagrams are exceptional even by current standards, they must have been mind-blowing a decade ago. They're smooth and lightweight, and very informative without detracting from the rest of the content.

That post has sit on my browser bar for.. well over a decade at this point. I've read it once, found it neat and put it there. Never really looked at it again, but i see the favicon every day since years and years. At this point it's part of the furniture. Anyhow, funny how stuff becomes "home" for sometimes the most random reason...

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