Creative Building Suggestions: Unfrozen Positioning, Item Coordinate Inputing, Subtracting/'Hollowing' Mechanic

CitruShark · Apr 9th 2017

Hello,

I was really glad to see some of the things I suggested in the past had actually made it in game! (frameless beds, skinning/fleshing/tanning mechanics, leather; not saying I'm the only one to suggest those things of course!) So I thought I would throw some ideas that have been rattling in my head for a bit in hopes something resembling it could be possible for the future

I'm sure I'm not the only person who is very nit-picky about having planks/beams/poles to be lined up as closely as possible, but can never get them aligned well enough and rage quit whatever project I aspired to make (even with the set/r/p/l all on 1)
Too many times has this happened to me and I would like to be able to build some great things without tearing my hair out over trying to keep things as seamless as possible, so I wanted to throw in a few solutions to this issue with creative building to see if any are feasible features for future updates (like I've said in the past, I know nothing about game creation/programming, so I can't gauge the logistics of implementing them)

1. Unfrozen Positioning- While being able to freeze a construction element in place is very useful for alignment, I find it equally problematic. Because if I want something to accurately align I have to play a guessing game on where to freeze an item in place to be at the right amount of distance for the positioning xyz value points to line up where I want them to, and as you probably guess it's a very tedious thing. I also think it would help to be able to enable transparency/intersecting placement via command key instead of having the block/plank/pole auto-stacking.

2. Coordinate Input: another suggestion is the ability to manually put in the xyz coordinates for your active construction item. Because this is an open world game I'd figure it would need to work by isolating a small area by highlighting blocks to work on (like with Blueprint creation). I don't know if inserting xyz values this could be a Command Control input or done via a unique type box opened up via keybinding. I'm not too confident if this one could work well

3. Item Subtraction/'Hollowing'- Like with the terrain tools, have a setting in creative construction for your selected item to essentially cookie-cut out an area of an existing plank/beam/pole. This further expands possibilities and methods for unique creation; I know I would be absolutely enthralled to be able to just place a wood pole and align a smaller one to hollow it out and make fast and easy pots/cauldrons/pipes/rings (creating those manually are the bane of my existence)

I hope you guys like/support any of my suggestions Personally I like the idea of item subtracting, who knows what crazy shapes you can make?

Miwarre · Apr 9th 2017

Thanks for the suggestions. However, I believe that the greatest current obstacle in construction is the way how rotations are obtained. I have described that extensively here and passingly here.

Quote from CitruShark

1. Unfrozen Positioning- While being able to freeze a construction element in place is very useful for alignment, I find it equally problematic. Because if I want something to accurately align I have to play a guessing game on where to freeze an item in place to be at the right amount of distance for the positioning xyz value points to line up where I want them to, and as you probably guess it's a very tedious thing. I also think it would help to be able to enable transparency/intersecting placement via command key instead of having the block/plank/pole auto-stacking.

I think I do not understand this point. Unfrozen positioning is already there basically: simply do not freeze it. The frozen positioning is very helpful in aligning and seamless connecting (as far as possible) elements. Which improvement do you envision, exactly?

(My usual work flow is 1) to freeze an element at the nearest block position -- using [G] / [RCtrl] / [G] -- to ensure a consistent 'origin' and then 2) move it by a specific number of steps -- see this post for details on block size, assumed real size and step sizes --; each step is likely to introduce rounding errors, and for this I try to use as few of them as possible and to start from the nearest 'fix', assuming that block positions are internally represented as integers and then suffer no rounding/truncation errors).

Quote from CitruShark

2. Coordinate Input: another suggestion is the ability to manually put in the xyz coordinates for your active construction item. Because this is an open world game I'd figure it would need to work by isolating a small area by highlighting blocks to work on (like with Blueprint creation). I don't know if inserting xyz values this could be a Command Control input or done via a unique type box opened up via keybinding. I'm not too confident if this one could work well

I am all for numeric input! However, the coordinate of which point of the plank/beam/log? Its origin? do you know/remember/can work out where the origin (or any other specific point) is in an element which has been rotated?

Currently, in the user interface, each of the X, Y, Z coordinate in RW is expressed as the index (possibly decimal) of block along the corresponding axis. Using decimal numbers for coordinates is likely going to introduce floating point errors again.

So the more precise way I can imagine looking from 'outside' of the code is to use the smallest step as measure unit. There are 400 position steps in a block. This would amount to specify a position as:

<block_index_X>|<step_index_X (0-399)>, <block_index_Y>|<step_index_Y (0-399)>,<block_index_Z>|<step_index_Z (0-399)>.

So, I share your impression that it could possibly not work very well either, particularly for sequences not following one of the coordinate axes (oblique sequences, stairs, spiral staircases, etc.).

Quote from CitruShark

3. Item Subtraction/'Hollowing'- Like with the terrain tools, have a setting in creative construction for your selected item to essentially cookie-cut out an area of an existing plank/beam/pole. This further expands possibilities and methods for unique creation; I know I would be absolutely enthralled to be able to just place a wood pole and align a smaller one to hollow it out and make fast and easy pots/cauldrons/pipes/rings (creating those manually are the bane of my existence)

This would definitely be a great addition! However, I do not expect it to happen any soon, or possibly ever. For the little I understand the way RW works, it would require an extensive, deep, structural rewrite of the code: possible, but not probable.

I would be content with more primitive shapes -- half log, quarter log / filled and hollow / ... -- and a greater range of size; this would at least allow to make rings, arcs, etc. much more easily than it is now.

Participate now!