I have not found this proposed in this form before. Forgive me if I have missed something. Here is my idea.
Does the Officer's Mess aboard your pride and joy feel just a little, well, blocky? I am sure almost everyone wants better interior decoration, and more character in their ships, outside and in. To my mind there is a very simple way of bringing this to fruition: a miniature mode. We've all noticed how everything looks better when it's bigger, and further away. So I propose a mode in which you can place blocks, let us say, 1/2 cm by 1/2cm, with the camera movement changing appropriately. They could be placed either as independent items or attached to a ship. With a block that small, players will immediately be able to make everything from chairs to toasters to piping to consoles to finely worked Classical sculpture and ceramic hippos, without a lot of difficult prefab modelling. It would add indescribably huge scope for individuality and richness of expression at all levels of the game, and the ships would begin to feel like real starships rather than just shells. In this mode there should probably be a way to place lots of blocks at once, because you'd need so many, and it would hardly constitute a balance problem as it would with ships themselves.
As it stands, if you wanted something that looked like a lamp, it would have to be the size of a battleship. With this mode, we could make a normal sized lamp and stick it on a table, no fuss. Ultimately, we could even make functional items this way, for instance by making a handgun from weapons blocks, with a docking module to show where it should be held. People would start making unique and desirable small-scale objects, and bang, meaningful trade. Bombdragondeathteapot778 makes the best Louis XVI Fauteuils in the whole galaxy: hijack his cargo! The Temple of Jupiter Stator in Skyros Sector has a gorgeous 10-foot sculpture of Jupiter: steal it and make your getaway! At the moment, there is nothing to make one person's wares more desirable than another's.
Initially, to make the physics simple, the objects thus created might only be able to interact on the level of normal blocks: i.e. once created, they only impact on other blocks, reflect light &c. So for instance they would only be destroyed by gunfire at the level of 200x200 blocks in one go. So you might think of them as shapes existing inside a transparent normal block. If your 70x30 mini-block wine bottle gets hit by a gunshot, it gets deleted all at once, effectively acting as a single fused entity. I don't know if this would be necessary to make things easier.
I'm no programmer so I would be interested to hear everyone else's thoughts on this. Would you appreciate the chance for finer modelling?
Does the Officer's Mess aboard your pride and joy feel just a little, well, blocky? I am sure almost everyone wants better interior decoration, and more character in their ships, outside and in. To my mind there is a very simple way of bringing this to fruition: a miniature mode. We've all noticed how everything looks better when it's bigger, and further away. So I propose a mode in which you can place blocks, let us say, 1/2 cm by 1/2cm, with the camera movement changing appropriately. They could be placed either as independent items or attached to a ship. With a block that small, players will immediately be able to make everything from chairs to toasters to piping to consoles to finely worked Classical sculpture and ceramic hippos, without a lot of difficult prefab modelling. It would add indescribably huge scope for individuality and richness of expression at all levels of the game, and the ships would begin to feel like real starships rather than just shells. In this mode there should probably be a way to place lots of blocks at once, because you'd need so many, and it would hardly constitute a balance problem as it would with ships themselves.
As it stands, if you wanted something that looked like a lamp, it would have to be the size of a battleship. With this mode, we could make a normal sized lamp and stick it on a table, no fuss. Ultimately, we could even make functional items this way, for instance by making a handgun from weapons blocks, with a docking module to show where it should be held. People would start making unique and desirable small-scale objects, and bang, meaningful trade. Bombdragondeathteapot778 makes the best Louis XVI Fauteuils in the whole galaxy: hijack his cargo! The Temple of Jupiter Stator in Skyros Sector has a gorgeous 10-foot sculpture of Jupiter: steal it and make your getaway! At the moment, there is nothing to make one person's wares more desirable than another's.
Initially, to make the physics simple, the objects thus created might only be able to interact on the level of normal blocks: i.e. once created, they only impact on other blocks, reflect light &c. So for instance they would only be destroyed by gunfire at the level of 200x200 blocks in one go. So you might think of them as shapes existing inside a transparent normal block. If your 70x30 mini-block wine bottle gets hit by a gunshot, it gets deleted all at once, effectively acting as a single fused entity. I don't know if this would be necessary to make things easier.
I'm no programmer so I would be interested to hear everyone else's thoughts on this. Would you appreciate the chance for finer modelling?