Design utility

Quote from Foxnyu

Hello everyone, could you clarify why blueprints can only be made larger or smaller and cannot be lengthened or widened.

Unfortunately blueprints can't be resized per axis because that wouldn't work as soon as the blueprint contains any rotated elements (or more precisely, as soon as not all blocks have the same rotation or are axis aligned). This image tries to illustrate the problem:

On this image, we have two blocks - the big diagonal one (1) and the small one (2). The blue line illustrate the blueprint itself. Left is the default blueprint, on the right is the blueprint resized along one axis (the X axis). Block 1 has a rotation of 45°, while block 2 has no rotation. Resizing the blueprint along the X axis works fine for block 2, but will stretch block 1 - unfortunately this is something the game cannot represent (right now construction elements only store a local scale along X, Y and Z).

Unfortunately this is tricky to solve: While we could store an additional scale with an arbitrary rotation, we would run into problems again if such a stretched element gets stored in another blueprint, which is then resized again using a different rotation.

Quote from Foxnyu

And if we export it .OBJ, the same thing would happen or we would already have the possibility of changing it as we want

Meshes (which is what the .obj file represents) can be resized per axis, because they don't contain blocks etc, instead they just contain the individual vertices But when exporting the blueprint to .obj, the game does not use this file (it's just there if you want to load the blueprint in an external tool, for example).

Blueprints don't store meshes, instead they only store the individual construction elements - this is much more memory efficient compared to storing a whole mesh: For instance, a single block consumes roughly 100 bytes, but if it was a mesh, it would be between 2 and 8 KB (depending on the shape). Large blueprints would easily exceed 100 MB and more in size.

When placing a blueprint, the game just places the individual construction elements. While the game still bakes all elements in a chunk to a single mesh (for reasons for performance), this is no longer related to a blueprint and therefore cannot incorporate the blueprint scale.

In theory we could overcome the scale limitations, but that requires some work (and would unfortunately open a new can of worms)