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[verdog]

Today I read this article about a new pentagon discovered that can cover a plane perfectly and completely by tiling.

At the bottom of the article, it has this nice picture of all such pentagons discovered so far:


I'd bet you could make a very interesting looking game with tiles of some of these shapes.

(the article also mentions that all triangles and quadrilaterals can tile a plane. Of course, hexagons can too.)

Has anyone ever seen/made a game that explored this idea? I'd imagine that it would get messy when you have to start dealing with pixels, but I still want to see/try it!

[-Ross]

Nonsense like this is why you shouldn't read news sites like the guardian.

Most of these are just hexagon grids cut into pieces, or square grids with a bump in them that they skewed so they look funky. "15 types" "discovered" my foot.

The whole point of grids in games is to simplify things. To break things into even, uniform pieces that are easy to use, easy to store, serve as a unit of measurement, etc.

[Glyph]

Nonsense like this is why you shouldn't read news sites like the guardian.

Most of these are just hexagon grids cut into pieces, or square grids with a bump in them that they skewed so they look funky. "15 types" "discovered" my foot.

The whole point of grids in games is to simplify things. To break things into even, uniform pieces that are easy to use, easy to store, serve as a unit of measurement, etc.

The point is to use an identical pentagon to achieve one of these tilings, and finding such a thing is non-trivial. The point of interest is not whether the resulting grid looks 'new'. I'm not a mathematician, but I have a suspicion that all the larger tessellating shapes built from anything that tiles perfectly can be broken down into triangles (one level lower than the squares or hexagons you mentioned, as those can obviously be broken down into triangles)

Edit: I agree with your takeaway though.

[verdog]

...

Well, of course the point of using a grid system is convenience/simplicity. That's why it's so common. I started this thread looking for the use of uncommon tile shapes.

Hexagons are probably the most common alternative to squares/rectangles, like in Opus Magnum:


The article just had me wondering if anyone was crazy enough to have tried any of the other shapes.