Obviously Aleph One can’t use actual circles, but no one wants to read or type “tetraicosagon” dozens of times in the same thread, so I’m going to simplify things for everyone by not using it.
Anyway, I saw a circle plugin for Weland on Simplici7y, and I’ve tried using it, but it doesn’t seem to function with Weland versions 1.4.3 or 1.4.4. So I’m doing things the hard way right now: I’m using custom grids to lay out the vertices of my circles four points at a time. But this is a pain in the arse. So I’d like to know what methods people have use to construct regular polygons when the need arises.
I suppose one possibility is simply to find an old version of Weland that still supports the circle plugin. And to be honest, that is a somewhat tempting option. Would there be any reason that using an earlier version of Weland (1.4.1, I think it was) to construct geometry, then going back to the latest version to work on everything else could introduce glitches into maps?
The second possibility I can think of is to generate the circles in Chisel, which would probably work fine until I inevitably pass the 1,024 polygon limit (I imagine that if I use more than one circle in my maps I’m going to pass that limit pretty quickly). Passing maps in and out of SheepShaver would probably quickly get tedious, though, and I’m led to understand that the Weland circle plugin was more of a WYSIWYG thing rather than having to run all the mathematics (that I no longer understand that well) manually.
The last possibility is to keep doing what I’m doing, I suppose.
Anyway, if anyone has any suggestions, I’d love to hear them.
(A tetraicosagon is a twenty-four-sided polygon. It would probably be truer to Marathon’s spirit to use a multiple of seven, but I’m going with twenty-four for at least three reasons: first, the grids divide cleanly into multiples of 15°, making it easier to construct points; secondly, it’s still a multiple of three, which is almost as good as a multiple of seven; thirdly, because Marathon has a limit of eight sides per polygon, I can fill the central portion of each circle with exactly four polygons, not wasting any sides. I’d rather use as few polygons as necessary, since Marathon also doesn’t support concave polygons, meaning that polygons on the exteriors of these circles will start to add up fast.)