Randomly Generating Patterns Using Hexagonal Images

Question

Okay so I have these images:

Basically what I'm trying to do is to create a "mosaic" of about 5 to 12 hexagons, with most of them roughly centralised, and where all of the lines meet up.

For example:

I'm aware that I could probably just brute-force it, but as I'm developing for Android I need a faster, more efficient and less processor-intensive way of doing it.

Can anybody provide me with a solution, or even just point me in the right direction?

Answer 1

A random idea that I had is to go with what Deepak said about defining a class that tracks the state of each of its six edges (say, in an int[] neighbor in which neighbor[0] states if top edge has neighbor, neighbor[1] states if top-right edge has neighbor, and so on going clockwise)

Then for each hexagon on screen, convert its array to an integer via binary. Based on that integer, use a lookup table to determine which hexagon image to use + how it should be oriented/flipped, then assign that hexagon object to that image.

For instance, let's take the central hexagon with four neighbors in your first screenshot. Its array would be [1, 0, 1, 1, 0, 1] based on the scheme mentioned above. Take neighbor[0] to be the least-significant bit (2^0) and neighbor[5] to be the most-significant bit (2^5), and we have [1, 0, 1, 1, 0, 1] --> 45. Somewhere in a lookup table we would have already defined 45 to mean the 5th hexagon image, flipped horizontally*, among the seven base hexagon icons you've posted.

Yes, brute-force is involved, but it's a "smarter" brute-force since you're not rotating to see if a hexagon will fit. Rather, it involves a more efficient look-up table.

*or rotated 120 degrees clockwise if you prefer ;)

Answer 2

Nice and tricky question. What you can start with is define object for each image which has attributes that specify which edge has a line attached to it. Then while adding the images in the layout you can rotate it in such a way that the edge with line in one image lies adjacent to the other image's edge with line. It may be little complicated but I hope you can at least start with something like this.