A builders Pallet? Modular Building

[zigyzigy]

Hello community.

Having started construction of my first big station I have found myself repeating rather a lot of tasks. The advanced build mode is amazing, as are mirrors and the copy/paste function but as useful as it is I tend to find that if I want to build a section of a station and incorporate some styling from a previous section that it can be quite difficult to get the copy size and orientation right to be able to grab that section and sometimes can be so fiddly that it is actually quicker to just build it by hand a second time.

What I have started doing now instead is building up a pallet of frequently used / time consuming to make objects that is very easy and quick to select, copy and then paste into place.

So - I have thought that maybe there are frequently used, time consuming shapes that everybody likes to use and having a template for a 'pallet' with all kinds of frequently used shapes on it can be added to any station and that can be quickly copied from to speed up your life.

I was thinking this may be of great help to new builders as well because it will speed up the building process and make it a bit more interesting, hopefully taking out some of the monotony of building some of the more tricky shapes.

In that light, I have started to clean up my own pallet to make it a bit more user friendly.


Here is my struts and scaffold pallet so far:

As you can see most of the above revolves around 45 degree shapes as there is nothing that advanced build mode can do to help build these faster than 1 or 2 blocks at a time except by using copy/paste and they are very commonly used shapes.

Currently everything is available in 5 different hulls:

White | Grey | Black | White Crystal | Hazard

The light blocks are indicators. Blue indicates where you should copy from to select the whole unit and red indicates where you should paste in order to tessellate the shape. Purple lights are used where the copy and paste area is in the same place.

Finally all of these shapes are either 10x10x10 or 10x10x1 in size so that unmodified servers can still make use of them.


My question to you is do you think this is a helpful project?
If yes then :
1) what other shapes that would fit in to a 10x10x10 space would you like to see?
2) what other hulls/materials would you like included in a pallet?
3) what do you think to having a logic pallet, a greebling pallet, a flooring pallet...?

Hope this makes sense, would love your feedback

 

[wat]

Yes, i think component-driven design is an incredibly good use of time, and I've got some projects in the work to make this easier for everyone. Like generating color and armor-level variations from a single template, etc...

In case you haven't yet, I'd recommend you start saving each component as a Template, to me these are easier to share than having to load a blueprint, make a selection, then copy.

 

[SkylordLuke]

you have templates now,why use this?

 

[ilec]

I think the idea is to pre-create a set of templates as a basic pallate rather than having everyone make their own templates from scratch.

My most useful template is a roofing set with lighting already in place. I use it in almost every station/planetary base I build

 

[Viridis00]

you have templates now,why use this?

Agreed, a pallet is unnecessary. I think a maybe a big community template pack could be a really cool idea though for making generic structures though.

 

[Megacrafter127]

I think a maybe a big community template pack could be a really cool idea though for making generic structures though.

Or a template generator? idk

 

[Gamel]

Or a template generator? idk

this sounds good, but i have no idea how to achieve the needs
Or an expand of build helper?(the one for circle)

 

[Megacrafter127]

Or an expand of build helper?(the one for circle)

der_scheme has made at least one additional buildhelper.

 

[The_Onion]

you have templates now,why use this?

eh, the load menu for templates gets too cluttered, atm. Plus, its kinda nice seeing the different set pieces you have before deciding which to use.

 

[zigyzigy]

you have templates now,why use this?

A good point, especially for people who have already made a lot of things but I was thinking that this would be an "all in one pack" which you can then create your own templates from.

I believe this has a number of advantages:
1) With a pallet you have a visual representation of what it is you are copy/pasting which currently the template system does not have
2) You can take the bits that you really like from the pallet and save them as your own templates with a name that you will recognize easily
3) If you want to use lots of different elements frequently for more complex builds then managing your templates list can be very difficult /tedious whereas a pallet can be organised into different categories based on hull type / color / functionality etc

Yes, i think component-driven design is an incredibly good use of time, and I've got some projects in the work to make this easier for everyone. Like generating color and armor-level variations from a single template, etc...

In case you haven't yet, I'd recommend you start saving each component as a Template, to me these are easier to share than having to load a blueprint, make a selection, then copy.

My thought was to either save the entire pallet as a single template or to have the pallet broken down into categories, either based on hull type, shape or function. This would mean that people who were not interested in for example the logic pallet could just not paste it in.

The only reason I uploaded a blueprint in this thread is that the template extension was not allowed for some reason ...

 

[wat]

Yeah the Templates are seriously lacking in their ease of organization, without previews and/or folders/categories.

But, this can be somewhat remedied by adopting a consistent and descriptive naming scheme for all your templates. I try to use something like the following:

General Template Name (armorlevel)(primarycolor-secondarycolor).

If you start accumulating too many templates maybe adding a category prefix could help you find them, like:

[category] General Template Name (armorlevel)(primarycolor-secondarycolor)