Hex Grid Renderer

About Hex Grid Renderer Android App

Hex Grid Renderer (HGR) is a free (and ad-free) Android app for creating hexagonal grids and exporting them to image files. It is intended as a utility for gamers who play tabletop games which use hex grids. HGR appears to be the only app of its kind in the Google Market.

ACHTUNG! NO LONGER MAINTAINED: as of Dec. 2014, nerve damage (from too much typing!) severely limits my programming time, so this app is being dropped from my list of projects. If you are interested in (and capable of!) taking over coding of this application, please get it touch!

This is my first Android app. It is "functional but beta," not terribly pretty, but what's there seems to work.

If you feel you need to rate it as only 1 or 2 stars, PLEASE be adult enough to explain why (in the review text).

This description page exists in an expanded form on the project's web page:

http://android.wanderinghorse.net/hex-grid-renderer/

The complete source code can also be found there.

Features:

- Easily create hexagon grids with only a few finger-taps.

- Customize the colors, labels, center dots, border, and hexagons.

- Supports wide-grain and tall-grain grids.

- Export hex grids as image files to other Android Activities via Intents. What does that mean? It means it can export your hex grids directly to GMail, GDrive, Dropbox, printer services, and others.

- Has undo support (15 levels) and save/load support. Loading can be "undone."

- User-configurable starting values for row/column numbers (version 20130309+).

- It speaks English and some degree of German. If you want it in a language of your choice, get in touch and i will send you the information you need to translate it :). Contact info is at the bottom.


ACHTUNG: If your device force-closes this immediately or when changing map sizes, then it has too little memory. See the NOTES section below for why.



PERMISSIONS:

- HGR requires EXTERNAL STORAGE WRITE permissions in order to save its images to the SD card (under SD/app-data/net.wanderinghorse.android.hexish/...) before handing them off to services like GMail, GDrive, or Dropbox. If there were a way to do this without a file, _and_ not risk an out-of-memory error by buffering the exported data in a byte array, the app would need no special permissions.



DEVICE COMPATIBILITY:

HGR is has been seen to work on API7 devices (Android 2.1.x). It is tested on several emulator configurations (with various Android versions), a Samsung Galaxy S2 phone, and an Asus TF300 tablet (both running ICS).


NOTES AND CAVEATS:

- "No warranties," and all that.

- When exporting an image, a copy is placed in your SD storage under under SDCARD/app-data/net.wanderinghorse.android.hexish/. There is a menu entry which shows you the exact path for your device. Also be sure to check your Gallery, as saved images "should" show up there at some point.

- If HGR suddenly crashes at startup (after it worked before), try the "Clear Data" option in the app control center to remove its persistent state. This "shouldn't happen", but just in case it does.


KNOWN PROBLEMS:

- If it crashes after changing radii or dimensions then the problem is almost certainly that the rendered grid takes up too much memory and Android is killing the app. Workaround: scale it back a notch. The memory hog is the drawing/scrolling parts, not the actual hex data (which has low, constant memory costs).

- If the app starts up with a blank black area, use Hexes==>Radius to set the radius. (This might have been a side-effect of local tests and might never happen in the wild.)

CONTACT:

Constructive criticism is always welcomed: feel free to contact the developer (Stephan Beal) directly (in English or German) via [email protected]. Code contributors are of course also welcomed (just get in touch). i cannot commit to adding every requested feature, but am nonetheless interested in hearing about your ideas for improvements.