Simutrans on hexagonal grid

[janry]

Hi,

TLDR: I'm porting simutrans to hexagonal grid.
https://github.com/SupraSummus/hextrans
https://github.com/SupraSummus/hextrans-pak128
Game is not playable yet

I played Simutrans a bit back in 2018 or so and I thought: nice game, the passengers know where they want to go.

Just kidding, I though: it would be cool to have this on hexagonal grid. That would take out some square anisotrophy observable in the train movement speed and other places.

I even starting digging at the code and figured out that converting simutrans to hex grid is a huge task. Shocker. Also, I dont have much experience with cpp. That combined made me abandon my wishes quickly.

And then AI coding came. At some point in 2025/2026 I became convinced that with frontier, paid models and tooling I can take on big projects in technologies I don't know in deep. General programming knowledge and systems design skills are enough - and I believe I have them. So I started porting Simutrans to hex grid. Still not easy, but realistic task for me. Please do not think this is as easy as prompting AI with "make simutrans on hex grid, make no mistakes".

And then I realized pakset needs to be ported too...

Anyway, dropping it here for some community engagement and for motivation. Technical-level thought I might provide in thread responses. A lot of it you can probably get yourself from the repos - just check `AGENTS.md` / `CLAUDE.md` / `TODO.md` as they contain most maintained documentation

Cheers, Jan

[Isaac Eiland-Hall]

It hurts my brain. lol.

Seems like there could be some really fun stuff you could do. And with "diagnoals" (which is really stair-stepping not a true diagonal),  you can even get 90° turns, as one screenshot does show. heh.

[poppo]

Interesting!

How are the coordinates definition, handling the edge of the map, and multi-tiles buildings?