Recently two people asked me about making a tile-based game that uses a sphere topology. Some games have tile maps that wrap around. Civilization for example lets you go off the left side of the map and you warp to the right side. You can’t go off the top or bottom of the map. In 3D space, this would be a cylinder. Some games also let you go off the top side and warp to the bottom, and vice versa. In 3D space, this would be a torus. But most tile map games don’t use a sphere. Why? The sphere doesn't tile. I thought … can we almost tile it? The answer is yes!
I wrote up my notes here including a small interactive demo. This is a quick & dirty investigation and not one of my longer polished articles; see this post about my wanting to write pages more quickly.
Any Chance you will explore this more?
@CraftyManiac: I probably won't unless it comes up in a game project. I think it's interesting (especially the tetrahedron) but it's hard to provide a fair evaluation of it until I've used it for something real.
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