[Lost a much longer post to a bad keystroke. Grr.]
Core problem: more data requires more processing power. If I make this great for 500m long ships, people will start complaining about the performance for 1km long ships. If I work out that one, then 4km ships will suck. People will always push the tool to its limits. So, yes, I\'m working on making it better but, no, you will always be able to create a ship that makes it lag!
The three tracks I\'m working on are...
1) OpenGL. This will speed up rendering a lot. (You can check the work-in-progress by adding a -opengl to the command line.) Unfortunately it uses more memory. In order to solve the memory problem, I condense the entire ship to a single mesh. That blows my ability to calculate which block you have clicked on. So I\'m currently scratching my head over that.
2) View Radius. This puts a horizon on things. It only draws blocks within a certain radius of the viewpoint. The OpenGL work uses a in-world viewpoint (like StarMade itself) so it would be easy there. But the classic rendering does not. So I either need to fix the OpenGL stuff, or else port the POV rendering to the classic view.
3) Aggregating zoom. I thought of this last night. The core problem is the number of blocks. So say you zoom out to \"zoom 4\". This would take all blocks in a 4x4 cube and replace it with a single block. This would let you zoom out and still get the general shape of the ship. You could then move the view point, do large scale cutting, coloring, etc. And zoom in again when necessary.
It isn\'t like one of these will solve all the problems. But if I can make progress on each of them, things should improve.
Now, to be honest, the core core problem is that the only real interesting thing to do in StarMade right now is to blow the crap out of each other\'s ships. That\'s why everyone is fixated on humungous ships. If the game becomes more interesting, then there will be different design challenges. That will hopeful mitigate the current desire for editing huge ships!
