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It seems very bizarre how we have so many types of doors, yet we don't have gates that are big enough for an XS vessel, but don't cost a fortune to make, and that aren't extremely difficult to find a place to put on a not M to L size ship. What I'm primarily getting at here is that you can make gates using sliding doors, sure, but they don't have a few major functionalities that gates have. First of all, they do not fold up like the normal gates do. Additionally, making a gate with a bunch of doors means that it cannot be tested for airtightness in the future (when that's probably a thing), due to being different elements, at different angles, and therefore most likely having unfixable gaps. Lastly, sliding doors don't really look that good when it comes to something like a hangar door. The aesthetic they give off is not "this is a super heavy duty airlock mechanism", more of a "I am a thing you push out of the way because I'm a door". Separate topic altogether, but folding doors, swinging doors, and of course gate-like compressing doors would be pretty cool too. The mor-doors the merrier. Ahem, but anyways, more gates when?

There are different ways doors could be implemented in DU. One is what I call an element door. This is one element that forms a complete door and frame. Another way, which I prefer, is what I call a voxel door. With this method, both the door and the frame are primarily made of voxels with a few small elements to handle opening and closing. As an example, imagine we have a slider. This is a small element, probably one voxel in size. Each one could look like a coil, to represent using mag-lev technology to connect the door to the frame. Several of these would be attached to the frame in a row to from a track. Several more sliders would be attached to one edge of the door. When the two groups of sliders were placed face to face, they would anchor the door in place, but allow it to slide back and forth. There would also be a control unit to operate the door. This could be another small, one voxel sized element, that might look like a touch panel. The primary advantage of voxel doors is that they allow a large amount of variety in doors. If there was just one element door, then every door in DU would look the same. There could, of course, be more element doors, but each one would be another project for the development team. With voxel doors, the same pair of elements could be used to make doors of any shape or size. Some might slide to one side, some might go up and down and some might split and move out from the middle. Adding one more element, such as a hinge, would allow even more variety. Once these elements were in the game, they could be used for more than just doors. The sliders and touch panel, for example, could also be used to build an elevator. There are two requirements to make this possible. First, voxels must be small enough to make a reasonably sized door. From the examples of building I have seen in the videos, the voxels in DU do appear to be small enough. The other is that voxels must be able to move next to each other without causing collisions. Especially in a space game, large gaps between the door and the frame would not be acceptable. I do not know whether the technology DU uses would allow this, but I hope it does.