Feedback on the Building Tool

Just been playing around in the latest dev branch (Alpha 8).

The tool feels like a good basic tool so far. It makes it easy to get some basic buildings thrown up.

In the short term it needs a few things:

  1. you need to be able to add lamps, beds, chairs, and other furniture at the “planning” stage, all at one go, so you can then save a template with everything. It’d also be nice if you could click a finished, furnished building and save that as a permanent template with all the beds and lamps etc. If there’s a way to do this I didn’t find it.

  2. Similarly, you shouldn’t have to have all your windows, doors, etc. built yet in order to add them to your plan and have your workers start work.

  3. It can be a little tricky to get stuff placed exactly right, even in 3d. The floor grid helps but maybe a 3d grid would be a helpful option.

  4. Need more default building templates and they need to be further optimized (and symmetrical! Why are the default buildings asymmetric?)

  5. I agree very much that being able to draw circle shaped floors would be a really, really positive option. Triangles would be good too. Right now it’s all rectangles and while the tool is conceptually very powerful I suspect it’s going to mostly end in a lot of little square huts.

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I’m sure the multi-story tools that we’ll see later will be much more powerful, but you know what would be really helpful right now? The ability to stop Hearthlings from taking down scaffolding until later. That way, I could just keep going up instead of having to place tons of ladders manually. Also/Instead, it would be nice to have a manual scaffolding tool. I think dragging out scaffolding would be less annoying than placing individual ladders.

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I think Ladders and Scaffolding should be ‘hack tools’ that every hearthling should get, no materials required. Have them go and retrieve the actual building blocks (to build walls/roofs/floors etc,.) but yeah Ladders and scaffolding should be auto tools, unless you actually command them to place them, then they should grab a log from the stock pile. If they auto place a ladder they should also auto retrieve them afterwards (so as to not litter the game world :slight_smile: ).

Benefits:
Stuck on the roof? auto build ladder to get down (retrieving it once task is accomplished)
Stuck in a pit? auto build ladder to get out (same with retrieve deal)
Time saver also (1 less time to the stock pile).
-Or-
If you don’t want the ‘Hack’ option, then have the Hearthlings auto grab 1-2 logs to keep on hand for emergencies (for all the above reasons) which would require them to maybe cut down more trees.

Would probably wipe out a few bugs also - Had issues with mining? not anymore if they built a ladder to reach that one lonely block that is stopping them from progressing and freaking out the AI. All your Hearthling are trapped in a pit with no help around? problem solved. Have a complex build that requires ladder upon ladder to achieve? bam! it’s streamlined building no more babysitting it and adding ladder section after section.

This wouldn’t stop from needing to manually place ladders either In some instances: like making a semi-permanent ladder to access a mining area placing a ladder 1 time would be time effective instead of having them build/tear down every time.Just make the manually placed ladders take priority over the emergency option. -My 2cent suggestion-

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It’s also possible Hearthlings could be equipped in the future with a Rope or Grapple, as well as being able to jump up to certain ledges or jumping down. A Rope might make more sense than a ladder, as it’s much easier to carry. Perhaps certain “exploratory”-oriented classes (we’ve seen mention of a Treasure Hunter class of sorts) can use more advanced versions of it, allowing them to traverse larger distances or even cross horizontal spaces, like a canyon (by shimmying across the rope).

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My little suggestion it’s that I need a way to Erase/delete/modify existing building templates in the building editor. I get a ton of errors just because i can’t delete a building template that i designed in the early alphas, and with all th new materials and such, it just doesn’t work anymore.

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Sorry, bringing back another feedback topic from the dead. Just started playing the new update, and I noticed something very different than normal (among many other things)–there’s no scaffolding outline for stand-alone walls!

Overall, this is a very small thing, but for all the projects I’ve been doing the past few months, knowing what side the game will default the scaffolding is actually pretty important! It helps prevent the “red conflicting structures” issue (which may or may not still affect the game’s functioning), but more importantly: it lets you know what side of the wall will turn invisible for the “internal structure view” mode!

Since I still hope on mixing both types of walls (stand-alone and the auto-build ones), being able to at least choose which side they place the scaffolding on (and hopefully choosing which side of the wall is the “outer” one for view modes) would be incredibly helpful and useful for large builds and towns with lots of walls.

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Completely forgot this was a stickied thread… Discourse is so wierd to use…

Made a big post about the new building tool in another thread, so Ill just link it here for perusal.

I think for the most part the building tool works fine, but the building AI doesn’t quite so much.
For the actual tool though, the biggest thing I think is being able to take more control over some of the automatic stuff, like walls and roofs

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I agree with the idea to have more control over automatic stuff like walls and roofs.

Also Scaffolding/building length/something else should be modified so that Hearthlings could build things under the roof like here

:

Also it would make underground building easier where the roof is making building difficult because you cannot reach the top 2 layers like here

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If you try and build two building within one square of each other, the scaffolding will become inaccessible during the building process.

To fix the issue, I had to build a ladder inside the building so the workers could keep going.

I’m not entirely sure this is a bug, but its kind of a grievance.

Thanks!

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I tried to build a basilica -styled curch an when i was placing the middle roof the walls jumped to the sky : DDD

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I was just throwing this out there. but i think it would be better if the foundation/floor of the buildings went under where the walls are so that its more flush and you dont have to build path in the doorways of the homes to remove the grass color. also so that the house isnt built up inside of the walls. another thing i was thinking about was being able to build multi-room structures with walls and doors on the interior. i tried this before on a previous version and the game didnt know what to think of it and could not accomplish the task.

Way ahead of you (regarding the walls being flush with the floor)! I actually made this suggestion back in the following thread a few months earlier (before multi-story mechanics were implemented):

Foundation Blocks to Erect Walls?

(Obviously, it’s a little out of date now with the current mechanics, but the basic argument for flush floors still stands.)

As for internal walls/doors/windows/etc., we’ve yet to see this mechanic in the GUI. You can get away with a little bit with the free voxel tool, but Radiant will be adding these as an actual feature in the future (think of it as Building, ver. 3).

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alpha 4?? @sdee was that a typo or cause were at alpha 10 and this post is only 2 weeks old

We were in Alpha 4 when this thread started, back in… June 2014. Wow. I didn’t realize it had been so long.

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I have made a video on me building a tower and the issues I run into. (Also bug at the end)

[edit]

Actually my biggest complaint is that the “Finished Editing” menu is not constant. It doesn’t appear all the time and I have exit the menu and then select the building a few times in hopes to get it to show up.

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-you cannot cancel planned walls or delete anything but slobs and floors.
-you cannot place a furniture you don’t currently have, and that means if you design a building at the very beginning of the game, it has to be an empty building.
-why not being able to just add doors and windows on slobs? that made less mess.
-the building plan sometimes just won’t work properly…I saved a building plan, and I went into another game, load the plan, place it on the ground, and boom! It just went into a mess…
-sometimes the building progress itself went into bug too…perhaps I have to design the house in the right way to make wokers accessable?

It was asked what’s needed in building tools. Cutting tools. Draw a wall, floor, or slab. Now cut some part of it out. Like stair access between floors, archer slits (murder holes), and mine entrances in buildings.

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Right now I would like the building tool allow you to add a door to an existing wall of a previous build, or be able to destroy and replace a segment of a building to remake the wall and add a door, and also make fences easier to place and remove…

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