Dt: advanced builder topics

http://www.stonehearth.net/dt-advanced-builder-topics/

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Stream should happen Thursday at 6:00pm PST as usual this week! It’s Justin, so bring your modding and building questions.

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I love how the heathlings are left starving on top of the statues.

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Very nice touch with the red pulse!!

I have a question, tho. Will the buildings be editable during/after construction phase? In other words, can we add a window to a building which is already constructed?

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It will be possible in the future. I don’t think we can do that yet.

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I am not envious of you devs, having to try to work out how to present all those features to the player in-game.

Even having followed the DT Tuesdays, when I was playing with the new builder yesterday I didn’t realise any of that stuff to do with the facing of the voxel you click effecting how your drag will work… In fact I was trying to build a crossbeam on the inside of a wall (clicking the side of a wall voxel of course) and got frustrated when clicking and dragging with the slab tool would only ever drag it out on the vertical. I did the standard thing and tried holding down shift or ctrl to see if it modified the behavior but not luck. Hmm now that I think about it, I could have just extruded more voxels from the one I wanted to start with, right?

The “floor view selector” also didn’t make intuitive sense, I thought it was to do with the roof and got a bit frustrated when it didn’t raise or lower the peak of my roof or seem to do anything at all… Also after I laid down a slab on top of the floor in a single room building to make a raised section of flooring it seemed to count as a “floor”.

I might suggest having a visual/text window on the UI pop up with some of the less intuitive features. Either that or feature a brief set of tutorials the player could call up at any point in time.

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Ooh, question. @devs

You mentioned you wanted a semantics feature for the voxel tool, how is that coming along?

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About the voxel tool: while making models for Archmod I realised much could be simplified if certain objects could be treated as slab-entity hybrids. They could use all the fancy render options of entities (scale, materials, maybe even effects and animations), keep separate net worth and appeal values and an ability to rotate them (maybe with a specification which sides must be attached to other slabs and which may not) but otherwise work like slabs. This would also make them be destroyed together with the building, what would make sense for building parts like columns.

I’m super curious how is your fence tool going to work because fence is a great example of such construction-entity hybrid. One doesn’t need any fancy options, fence is a completely static part of construction but is has to use entity rendering options.

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