A hex world WIP (and WIP app) - personal project

[torstan]

Not concept images - a working prototype Just search the web for #hexallthethings and you'll see the live test results using the actual app.

[J.Edward]

Just searched that. Thanks for that. Now I have my reading for tonight.
All of it that I've seen so far looks great. Did you do the code? If so, did you have experience before you started this project?
I only read a quick snippet from your site, which I will read in depth later.

[torstan]

Yep, I've been coding for a long time. I took a run at this last summer on holiday when I wondered 'how hard can it be?'. Here we are close to a year later, getting close to a functional version.

If you're interested - it's a mongoDB backend, with nodejs as the middleware, but the heavy lifting is all done client side, and that's all html, css, and jquery. And quite a lot of math.

[J.Edward]

I know enough to know what you're talking about but not enough to know how to do it.
So how did you come to be doing both code and illustration? I haven't encountered many people who do both.

I assume you are developing this for a profit in the end. If so, are you going to use a pay model or ad model for revenue?
I have to say, I find this stuff very interesting.

[torstan]

It'll likely be a payment to have your maps live for a given amount of time. People tend not to need this always on, so a monthly subscription won't be a good match for everyone - and everyone is rightly nervous about never ending monthly subs (gymn membership anyone?). The traffic through the app will be too low for ads to pay the costs (and they always look a bit crap and hurt performance)

So, something like an upfront payment for a given amount of time. There'll almost certainly be a free sandbox. And also a commercial license for a company interested in using the app to support a campaign setting.

It's an open secret that I was also a research scientist for 10 years. I did most of my mapping evenings and weekends, and my day job involved a decent amount of coding. And a bunch of that work also involved data visualization using web coding. So that helped too

[torstan]

And a little more progress. Coastlines coming together:

Screen Shot 2015-05-25 at 1.33.54 PM.png

[Chick]

And a little more progress. Coastlines coming together:

Screen Shot 2015-05-25 at 1.33.54 PM.png

Just out of curiosity, are you doing these top down, then the 58% squash to make them isometric? That's a technique that strikes me as very useful

[J.Edward]

I had to subscribe to this thread. Too much good stuff in here.
What was your area of research, if you don't mind me asking?
You seem to have a rather interesting life story Torstan.

[torstan]

Theoretical high energy physics. Specifically particle physics beyond the Standard Model, dark matter, predictions for the Large Hadron Collider, and Ultra High Energy Cosmic Rays from other galaxies. That took me from the UK to the US, via Poland. I moved to data science and now run a research group. Mapping is still an evenings and weekends gig, but a fun break from the research world.

[torstan]

I'm free handing them direct. After doing this for a while I only use the squashed top down trick for complex maps like cities. Super useful though.