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Astronomy used this for very long time. Most advanced is Healpix: http://healpix.sourceforge.net/

I really like how fast it is. For example irregular area size of Greenland at 1 meter accuracy only takes a few hundred MB. One can do joins and unions, on such areas on modest laptop.

Disclaimer: I send a few patches to this project.

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HEALpix is cool. It has the same connectivity issue as with all the solutions — some locations are a little different. With hexagons a few polygons are different (polygons); with HEALpix a few vertices are different (three quads instead of four). In games we can get away with not mapping everywhere whereas in astronomy we can't :-)

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