I need to draw textured hexagons. I think Geometry class must help me, but it only for internal use.
How to solve my problem?

Draw a square with transparent corners

Not if you used the correct shape triangles.



and of course, you can split that into simple quads, too.

Edited by user Thursday, February 23, 2012 10:27:22 AM(UTC)  | Reason: Not specified

You could just go the easy way and use normal texture drawing with transparency like the others here suggested. There is basically no benefit drawing hexagon polygons instead of just quads (the textures won't be much smaller and the overhead for drawing a few transparent pixels can be neglected usually).

If you have a special use case (e.g. 3D hexagons, opaque only hexagons and you want the last bit of performance and pack textures more tightly), then it might be worth the effort to do your own hexagon polygon based drawing. To do that I suggest looking at the DrawManager class (in Delta.Rendering.Basics) and implement your own geometry drawing class (like Line, Rectangle, Circle, etc.) and do whatever you like in there (line drawing, textured hexagons, shaders, etc.)

Edited by user Thursday, February 23, 2012 5:03:57 PM(UTC)  | Reason: Not specified

Drawing 320 quads is really nothing serious, you can draw thousands of quads with alpha even on the slowest platforms (3 year old iPhones). The more important trick is to only switch textures rarely (the engine will generate atlas textures for you) and maybe only update geometry that changes (the MaterialManager will handle that for you).

As I said above there is a benefit of drawing with your own hexagon polygons (half the compressed texture size usually when no alpha is needed, maybe a bit more if you can pack the hexagon textures tightly, this will give you a slight rendering increase), but it probably can be neglected (less than 10% of your overall performance if this is even a critical point for your app).

Why don't you just go the easy way and render your hexagon tiles with alpha? If rendering performance is worse than you expect, you still can optimize.

Edited by user Thursday, February 23, 2012 5:28:25 PM(UTC)  | Reason: Not specified