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Should we be able to place a voxel without a core attached to it?


Aaron Cain

Should Voxels be place-able without core or not?  

23 members have voted

  1. 1. should voxels be placeable without a core?

    • Yes, with no restrictions
      6
    • Yes, but only in owned territory
      9
    • No
      8


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Imagine you want to build a road on your nice piece of owned land but you do not like to add all these small cores to it.

 

Imagine that monument you want to place, but you dont want that core as an art element on it 

 

Imagine that grand bridge you want to build but its to large for a single core, and by the way, where would you place it without destroying the classic bridge you are planning to build

 

So why not build it with only voxels and no core in your own private territory?

 

For some structures with no elements the added value of adding a core is 0%, can't lua a voxel, rights are not needed as you own the territory, so why add the core to the voxel structure as it brings a much more emergent gameplay if you could build voxel structures without it.

 

And indeed if you want to add elements to it, you just need a core anyway.

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I suspect this would require a major change in the design of the game, since every construct having a core seems to be a very fundamental concept.   If this would require essentially starting development over, I do not think it would be worth it.

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6 hours ago, Ben Fargo said:

I suspect this would require a major change in the design of the game, since every construct having a core seems to be a very fundamental concept.   If this would require essentially starting development over, I do not think it would be worth it.

Im not sure about this, technically there should be no difference between this and the adding ground, unless the entire planet is seen as a massive core. Hmmmm lets hack it :P

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No it isn't. An easy approach would be (without breaking the game or forcing redesign) to simple make the ability to designate a build (not ground) voxel as a core unit, with restrictions, such as you can only do it on contiguous materials - so you can make that road, or statue, out of a single material, and make part of it core.

 

Option 2, since this is really about ascetics, is to force core units to take on the appearance of voxels around them once the build is finished or perhaps blueprinted. Yes - blueprinting would be the perfect time to do that... you make something with a normal core, turn it into a blueprint, and in all future things produced from the blueprint, the core voxel looks like those around it.

 

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Oooh great. Well if we can use world voxels like this then technically you can already build that road out of rock or anything else. But then again you can also build a complete house out of world voxels with this.

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They already are planning to let us build with the world voxels too.  That's what you'd be doing when you add or remove terrain.  The question is whether they let us use other building textures and advanced tools and shapes like in the video.

 

The thing about the world voxels is that they're slightly larger then the ones we build with on cores.  So you wouldn't be able to build in as fine detail.  Building with the world voxels also means that voxels warp each other when you build near the ground.   So you couldn't seamlessly place a road or building into the terrain, the way you can when building with a separate voxel grid.

 

It could be fun for us to be able to do more then just terraforming with the world voxels though.  I think I might still want to use a construct to build a road just for the smaller voxels.  Having the multiple voxel grids to build with is definitely one of the best parts about the building in DU, for me.

 

 

 

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perhaps if static constructs were not cubes but you could specify x,y,z say 128 x 20 x 2 (l,w,h) and the core could be either 1x1x1 in size or not visible the same could be achieved. having a core means ownership,permissions,position and rules about  voxels attached to the core are managed. If you have no core then you would need to manage the information at a per voxel level . That's not to say it can't be done.

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16 hours ago, supermega said:

@Aaron Cain You can place voxels from any material in you're inventory. The video was just one example, but he's done it before in other videos. From what I understand Placing voxels is different from Building constructs, but both are possible in game.

Yes and no.

 

Placing voxels is essentially an activity - a method if you will.

 

Building a construct (signified by the initial placement of a core unit) is one context in which one then proceeds to place voxels in order to achieve an outcome.

 

Terraforming is another context, denoted by placing voxels of a certain class (world voxels) onto existing voxels of a certain class (world voxels).

 

Building "stuff", as is suggested (lets not call them constructs, as they are different to core unit constructs) would be yet another context, where one is placing voxels of a certain class (materials) onto existing voxels of a certain class (a construct) - noting you can only, afaik from other vids (given the building tool use we see above is, as pointed out, unlikely in terraforming), place material on a core unit, else it's really just weird terraforming.

 

So in considering the OP's question/suggestion - how to approach the issue of ascetics in the building of a construct given core units look ugly - my response - that the easy approach is to make core units take on the appearance (texture) of surrounding voxels in the construct, would seem to be both fairly achievable without too much effort, and an elegant solution. And it would seem that if we were able to texture core units, that's really the problem solved.

 

In terms of the OPs issues around object size as with the statue - I suspect that is then a deliberate design thinking approach in that you are unlikely to try and build fine detail things which have widths/heights/depths smaller than the dimensions of the smallest core unit, because then, as is pointed out, you see the core and it looks ugly. In that sense, all one can hope is that eventually we have the option to scale items turned into blueprints when they are then redeployed, so we build at scale, and then shrink it upon deployment - I can see that as the logical means (far far down the track) we will have of creating items in game - electronics and gadgets and other things to add flavour to the world?

 

I feel that really this will only ultimately be addressed by devs if and when the compute power for tracking such small complex objects (which starts to approach essentially, real RP1 style technology/VR/Matrix) becomes essentially negligible.

 

This will always be the issue with DU and any real open world/universe game - Science has already concluded that at current tech, the idea that reality as we actually know it is a computer simulation is impossible, as the computer power required to sustain such a complex simulation is greater than the power in the known universe. So we have to suck it up - we can't have a "to scale galaxy" and "as close to real life tiny or complex objects like art and sculpture, as possible" at the same time. This stuff is expensive on computing, and NQ went with a persistent galaxy first rather than an Alioth we can never leave. Because then spaceships and pew pew sci fi meta would be pointless.

 

IMHO.

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PS: Incidentally I voted Yes - no restrictions. Because, just like in real life, there should be nothing in terms of actual physics etc to stop me say, going anywhere with a bag of bricks and mortar, and just building something.

 

Of course , there is equally nothing to stop someone objecting to my building stuff there and putting a bullet in my head... you gotta chose your battles - this isn't Friendship Is Magic. In real life, you hop my fence and start building a BBQ, I'm gonna be pissed and probably take a cricket bat to you. Oh, alright - and call the police first because I am a fine upstanding citizen or something. Because that's how real life works.

 

Unless it's a really bloody good BBQ. Then I'll let you.

 

Ok. So I should of used a different analogy.

 

And yeah - no core unit, so no - I can't then wire my bricks up and turn it into a robotic brick hunter killer. It's just a pile of bricks and mortar that sits there. Possibly being used to make cooked meat products in the corridor of your ship. If you don't mind.

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  • 4 weeks later...

I don't see why you shouldn't be able to place videos without a core as I Devs already showed that you can do just that. Maybe they will drop it due to technical limitations but based purely on the publicly released videos you can place voxels without cores.

 

However, I would like to see some limitations placed on your ability to make constructs without cores. Firstly, I would like it to be that you can only place coreless voxels on tiles you own. Second, you should not be able to place elements like doors and containers, you should only be able to place voxels.

 

Why do I want these features and limitations because I have a soft spot for those trying to make trains and roads. Train to be a particularly difficult to make because you would have to make the rails from scratch out of voxels rather than elements. Anyone who try to make a train in space engineers can tell you that trying to make a set of rails that curve with the planet is a pain to do as you have to line up each static grid that acts as your rails with each other. Being able to place voxels down without a core would make this process a lot easier, the same applies for road building.

 

However, in order to stop this feature from being abused I do not want there to be any elements to be placed without a core. If that were allowed it would be far too easy to abuse. You should not be able to make a fully functioning base without having to invest in the appropriately sized core.

 

Neither should you be able to just build whatever you want. If you want to build a set of tracks or road or a monument of some kind then be on land you own. It would be far too easy for griefers to ruin your work otherwise.

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Someone mentioned that the game might internally have world voxels and core voxels be separate things. I think another possibility is that planets have their own special type of core under the hood with their own limitations like how static and dynamic cores have their own limitations to facilitate things like RDMS.

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