Kupu's thread

Here is an example of how i use them...


And here...

 

That's very nice work both with the pipes and everything else on the screenshots... But we were discussing those cubic decorative pipe blocks (which originally featured several differently colored conduits, but now is entirely blue), not the non-cubic, 3D model pipes.

 

Ooopsssy daysy...

I agree that all blue thing is ugly. I don't use them anymore. I liked the contrast between the wrm colors and the cold ones with the old piping block. You could see that those were tubes and conduits...

 

The old pipe block texture was used as books in a shelf by me and some other builders. Not sure if the new one still accomplishes that.

 

I always felt that they were hard to integrate into places which used more strict/limited color palettes. But if they would have been less saturated, their color-coded style sure would have been a nice thing to have.

The new only-blue version might benefit from making the different conduits different shades/brightness of blue, and then create a few other one-colored variants of the block with the same pattern of lighter and darker shades of their color.

Perhaps you could try rows of half or 1/4 basic armor slabs for that... That's what I tend to put on my office shelves or library book racks.

 

The thing I noticed after the last round of texture updates, is that certain red cascades which were placed in a way to indicate fuel flow have flipped... I checked elsewhere on the same structure, and it proved to be consistent.

Then I made a simple test: I built a simple platform ship with pairs of red and blue cascade blocks assuming each of the six possible orientations, in the last 0.200 game version, then imported the blueprint into a 0.201 (post-weapons update) game version. The blue ones retained their flow direction, while the red ones flipped, and consistently: front-facing ones turned backwards, up-facing ones turned downwards, and so on (meaning that while they were placed to have the same flow direction as their blue counterparts, they ended up flowing opposite to the blue ones next to them).


So yes, if the texture images weren't changed in this regard, than it has to be some bug with changing block rotations.

 

It would be nice if small buttons look like they belong to the blocks.

The small activator requires 24 rotations, but the button only needs 6 (it is rotation-symmetric at 90°)
It can have 6 more rotations which show it in the bottom right corner of a decorative switch for example (and that would have a free field there)


Another 6 rotations could show 4 buttons which are labeled 1, 2, 3, 4 inside a circle.
This can be useful to indicate that every use toggles one of 4 behaviors wired to it.
The block behind it could also be a rotatable rail showing directions or a Display block adding some text on an outline intentionally left for this text or the rail's directional image.


I know this likely requires some code-work, but you have a good connection to the shine-staff,
so I leave this idea here:

A very thin logic block slab that uses the 4 animation-images or 6 face-images for circling through 4-6 visuals every time it's activated (like a flip-flop) until cursor position can define the destination state natively.

If connected to others in a loop, they could work like activators and activate everyone only once for each logic-frame (unless a delay is added, they only state-change once).
Behind a glass slab, they can represent multiple states explained by a display block aside which is also protected by a glass slab.

Every state only activates a certain block ID (activators, AND, OR, NOT).
Actually it's better we had blocks that only react on a certain rotation-signal like "not rotatable rails that only turn on when they should rotate into one specific direction they already have and off otherwise".
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4 would fit the boxy nature, but 6 are good to cover all axis (xyz+-) and the decorative switch also has 6 switches which might be a good number to in-cooperate them into decorative images.​