Dynamically creating hexagons from real-word data (Part 1 - Roads)

Part 1 - Roads
Part 2 - Railroads and Forests
Part 3 - Data-Services

As I mentioned in one of my previous posts I have some cool ideas that I would really like to try out. One of them involves creating hex-based battlegrounds dynamically around the world.

So, one would pick a region and that particular area would be overlaid with hexagons that represent real world-data like rivers, roads, forests, mountains, etc. All of this on top of Bing Maps.

It's not very easy to explain my goal so let me use the boardgame Memoir'44 as an example. Here's an actual map from that game.

Now suppose all of this was generated dynamically based on a real map, which would contain a road and some forests.

This is not an easy task and I'll break this into pieces (pun intended). On this first post I'll just address road creation.

Bing Maps Module: InfoboxAutoPan

I've just created a very, very simple Bing Maps module. I'll jump ahead to the demo before any explanation.

Demo:  http://psousa.net/demos/bingmaps/infoBoxAutoPanModule/simpleExample.html

Basically there are two maps, both with a pushpin near the edge and a click handler to display an infobox.

After clicking the pushpins this is the end-result:

Converting from Leaflet to Bing Maps

A few months ago I developed a map-based game for a contest. It was a simple multiplayer wargame on which 4 players could try to conquer Europe using a bunch of different units.

For the mapping API I had to decide between Bing Maps and Leaflet. At the time, as I expected to have to use Canvas to draw the hexagons (which Leaflet supports with canvas tile-layers) I chose Leaflet.

I've now decided to pick-up this game and evolve it into something more "tangible". Thus, and although Leaflet has nothing wrong by itself, it's "just" a map api. I need something more complete and so I've decided to port the game to Bing Maps. Afterwards I'll improve it with some really cool ideas that I have. This blog post should be more or less a catalog of the changes I had to make to convert this game from Leaflet to Bing Maps.