Funny you should mention that - the author happens to have written what I consider the best resource out there for hexagon drawing algorithms for game development:
I'm a bit curious about this, I am a video game developer (3d console games) and hexagon coordinate systems don't strike me as being awesome. Reading through the article you linked to confirmed my suspicion that there would be a great many possible parameterizations, and it seems like the kind of thing that wound cause a lot of confusion amongst developers, much like Euler angles do. I had hoped that the article would start with some kind of motivation section describing why one would be willing to suffer such horrible inconveniences, but the article got too far into the not gritty before explaining the benefits (I stopped reading half way through so maybe it was buried in there somewhere?)
I know that they are associated with rpg board games and therefore have found their way in to 2D RPG video games as well. I can see a slight advantage to using them on a board game situation where it would make it more accurate to estimate diagonal distances by counting tiles, but in a computational situation where your box can compute the Pythagorean theorem a few million times a second, the benefit of using hex systems in games eludes me.
> It is likely that HEXAGONS will continue to increase in popularity over the coming years, as humanity enters a glorious new hexagonal golden age, and all sentient beings on our planet ascend to a new, higher state of hexagonal consciousness.
I forgot to say that if anyone hasn't seen it, RedBlobGames' tutorial on hexagonal grids is an extremely good resource that uses visualization and interactivity to great effect, and really helped me in early stages of my work:
That's utterly awesome and I hope the links didn't come across as "this has already been done"—quite the contrary—the intention is just "here are cool similar things if anyone's curious". A hexagonal version is a noble and clever addition!
A lot of the reasons seem reminiscent of why hexagons are awesome in video games: https://www.redblobgames.com/grids/hexagons/
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