After 100h+ of playing under the belt , I am welcoming with joy this new update, Excited. the changes about the connection of block will help a lot when you want to redo some part at the beginning of a chain of parts ( the old way). Thank you for it. I am taking the opportunity for little feedback: - Sometimes I making a base of vehicule and I am working on different variant of it with different claw and stuff. By doing and saving the iteration, I quickly reach the limit of 100 saved design. It would be nice if we can organise it a bit with something like folder for example. - the channel mechanism can be tedious when adding a lot of controlled part that need to be on the same channel. Would be nice an option somewhere, when picking up a controlled part, where you can set auto-incremental channel or not to have the option to not increment the channel number when placing a controlled part. Overall , great work, awesome game!.
This is huge! I love it! Instead of it being "magnetic" maybe you can, when placing a block, still draw the little pegs where connections are made. Kinda of like automatically adding pegs where needed, and giving a visual indication of what parts are being attached.
To address slowdowns: Find all pieces that have a rigid connection to each other (could find several "islands" of rigid pieces) and combine each island into one rigid body each.
To the selecting when you have three or more connections issue (but should work in the general case): Use A* (path finding algorithm) to find a path to the CPU from each of the selected piece's connected pieces. If a path is not found the piece is not connected. Flood fill from that same piece to find all pieces connected to the disconnected piece. Note that flood fill will also eventually find the CPU (if connected), but is a slower approach than A*. Besides, you want to see if they are at all connected and only flood fill if not.
I think this changes are positive because gives more control and options, great update for the game, by the way 100% recomend it its a great game, love the graffic style
This new system is little more clicks to remove things, but much less clicks to add things, overall about 50% of click reduction, that improves productivity of building. Thank you, that is huge. I would like to change horizon lines of small hills that are close to vehicle. They disappear when getting closer, but they still are small hill, and sometimes my car bumps into them and drops package. I change camera angle to side of car to see hill better, but still not always seeing hill. I would like to change color of closest hill lines, but still keep line until i drove past hill (hill is behind camera view). Maybe this won't be problem anymore because now i can build 6 big tires with 1 spring to each that attach to central shaft, in that way making 1 big tire 6-10 times larger than big tire. Need to test it, how steering works on it. If it works, then i can drag race full speed with rockets at back over small rocks, and don't even notice them. Thanks for new building parts. I am excited about new big builds with many moving parts. Hope you are working on player changing controls of each moving part with player chosen keyboard key. That would remove rotating between moving parts while driving. And would allow to move many parts at the same time.
@juriscervenaks8953 I tested big tire design and didn't work. First i put bearing in center shaft, but tires would go around, but car would have less speed than normal tire design, because bearing would go opposite way to tire rotation. Then i tested with 2x servo motor on each shaft, but they don't have power to rotate that big mass. It would be good if tire also would have attachment on both sides, so i can connect central shaft to central tire. Then when i push W, not only 6 outside diameter tires would rotate, but also central tire, that would rotate central shaft. And also i forgot that even big tires have much sliding. My current design is the best for fast travel and raised body with cargo. 8 big tires on each side of car and each tire on separate 1x heavy and 1x medium spring. Still doing missions to get even more tires for better traction. And of course 4 rockets at back and big fuel tanks that get refueled between checkpoints between pick up and drop off mission points. Still experimenting with big cranes for big cargo.
The way the building works in Trailmakers is the way it should work here IMO. If you remove a part that other parts are attached to, they should stay there floating and be movable, and the editor just won't let you leave if there are any part that aren't connected. Love this game, but check out Trailmakers for inspiration because they way the building works in that game is about as good as it get for something like this.
Is a replace tool possible? Something like you select a part from your parts list, enable a replace mode, highlight a part in your build, a click replaces the highlighted part with the part chosen from the parts list. In my head it would work basically the same as deleting a part, but with the added automatic step of placing a chosen part in that position. Would save a lot of clicks while building. Edit: Thinking about it, for just replacing a single part, it wouldn't actually save any clicks. But it would make it easier to follow your train of thought when replacing multiple parts with the same one.
Great game developers and interaction designers, bridging science and art with creativity. I hope you can receive my email and have academic exchanges with you.
