Quality of Life Improvements that really should be in the next update.

[Reilly Reese]

Here's a small list of things that might slip under the rug and while they don't affect gameplay majorly really need to be seen soon.

1. Grate Collision Mesh Fix (As far as I know this is already confirmed but i'm not going to stop mentioning it until it's implemented)

2. Block Labeler implemented on stations. If you don't know what i'm referring to just hop in a ship and look at blocks in build mode. It's something you could consider negligible but it really helps identify blocks a player may be unfamiliar with or blocks that are culled because they're surrounded by others and aren't actually visible.

Spoiler: Pictures

In a ship every block is labeled. ^

However station buildmode does not feature this labeling box.

3. Full Girder Block Rotation. Girders right now are missing important rotations meaning that when you want to hide the odd one out side and just have the girders, in many cases, you can't.

4. Sunlight through closed doors (and purportedly hulls) As you can see bellow this room is practically entirely unlit by plex-lights. Where is the light coming from?

Through the door, the force shield, and the water from the sun outside.

Curiously in a room directly under the position where the first picture was taken, with the door closed it's actually properly lit.

EDIT

5. Metal Mesh slabs. We have metal grill slabs but not metal mesh ones which is kinda odd and limiting because you only have one choice for the slabs.

 

[NeonSturm]

Yes, that's really odd.
Though I kinda like the sun lights "ambient light" in your picture.

 

[klawxx]

Do not forget about this one:

• https://starmadedock.net/threads/we-need-inner-corners.31090/

This is a must!

 

[Muffin_man17]

I cant tell you how many times I ran into the girder issue. I had to change designs to rooms and other things against what my ideas were which really hurts the creative sandbox building nature of this game. Overall I think we need the ability to rotate any block to any orientation since I also found girders are not the only blocks acceptable to this issue.

The light appearing through the doors is a new one and definitely also needs to be addressed.

Something else I noticed is if you use grill detail blocks then you can see through whatever blocks they are placed on. I have some grill blocks on the ceiling of my ships and I can see through the entire ship through those grill blocks.

 

[DeepspaceMechanic]

Very much agreed... It would be a shame not to fix the issues you brought up, at some stage.

4. Sunlight through closed doors (and purportedly hulls) As you can see bellow this room is practically entirely unlit by plex-lights. Where is the light coming from?

Through the door, the force shield, and the water from the sun outside.

Curiously in a room directly under the position where the first picture was taken, with the door closed it's actually properly lit.

That lighting bug is actually more serious than simply allowing sunlight to pass through vanish-able, non-transparent blocks.

It goes through anything; the key is the dimensions of enclosed, windowless compartments.

As you go higher in the width/length/height of closed spaces, they get more and more light inside, to the point where the contents of eg. large hangars are as brightly lit as they would be outside in open space. I tested this once with a series of compartments, all without any artificial lighting, that gradually increased in width/length/height from 9x9x9, 11x11x11 and so on. As I flew through all of them in build mode, they got ever brighter... Which sucks.

How awesome it would be to be able to build vast, barely lit factory bays with hanging chains, long-dead machines and the promise of xenomorph attacks, right?!

Although we do have this mod that might be a good temporary solution, but I haven't tested it yet: https://starmadedock.net/content/true-darkness.7049/

 

[Reilly Reese]

Though we do have this mod that might be a good temporary solution, I haven't tested it yet: https://starmadedock.net/content/true-darkness.7049/

Depends on if that mod works with the "New Lighting System".

 

[NeonSturm]

Something else I noticed is if you use grill detail blocks then you can see through whatever blocks they are placed on. I have some grill blocks on the ceiling of my ships and I can see through the entire ship through those grill blocks.

Does it happen with plants too? If not, it's just a simple config issue or an issue with alpha-values in the PNGs.

 

[klawxx]

Does it happen with plants too? If not, it's just a simple config issue or an issue with alpha-values in the PNGs.

Lets also not forget about slabbing of crystal blocks. If you slab a transparent block and pair it with a slabbing of an armor block you can see through the intersection, like there's nothing there. Not sure if someone already mentioned this in this thread if so, sorry to duplicate that.

 

[NeonSturm]

But sometimes it can be used for nice effects.
An observatory in your ship seeing through the own entity, like there is a camera installed outside the ship hull and a projector to that wall.

We should keep that bug, but trap it in special blocks.

 

[Muffin_man17]

Does it happen with plants too? If not, it's just a simple config issue or an issue with alpha-values in the PNGs.

Hmm interesting thought, I'll have to try more tests to better reproduce the issue.

Here's some screenshots of what I see at least on one of my builds:


Ceiling view, notice that lighting on the corners on the grill blocks.


Here's a closer view, you can see yellow force field blocks from above.


Here's the view from the upstairs looking down at the floor above the grill blocks.


Just wanted to mention that this was a thing I've been finding while building. Wondering if this would still be considered a local config issue or something with the PNG values. I'll still need to try more tests to find how to reproduce the issue because just building a 10x10 floor and adding grill blocks is not reproducing it. I'll report back my findings.

 

[Reilly Reese]

Added mesh slabs as an edit.

 

[MeRobo]

Added mesh slabs as an edit.

iirc mesh didn't get slabs due to the way the compressed texture on the faces which aren't full size looks.