Rejected Scale of blocks.

[Al Mac Dady]

This may be out of the scope of this game. If so I apologize. When you get closer to the releasing the game scale down the blocks so we can play with higher definition builds and terrain. Thank you.

 

[godmars]

From the roadmap: https://trello.com/c/ztycVUFa/23-shrinking-the-size-of-blocks-overall

"
As described here and here the idea of making all the blocks in the game smaller.

We don't see any benefits that would come from this that could be achieved through other means. Discussions are seen in the above threads, but it's been decided we won't be shrinking the size of blocks overall in the game."

 

[Kaamio]

One could argue that having ships with smaller blocks and giving stations and planets simple set of entity based modifiers to represent their larger block size, ships could be both detailed and ultimately smaller while the universe might feel a little bit bigger.

And stations would be more intimidating. It wouldn't even need separate blocks, stations could just be more efficient because space magic.

Of course, station/turret/ship docking interactions could get really weird if you want to be able to build station scale turrets, but then again small scale turrets can be more detailed.

 

[Effane]

Problem is reducing block sizes becomes a time investment of exponential means. Lets say you make all blocks 1/2 their size. That means a person would then need to place 8x as many blocks to fill the same void as one. Yes, detail increases by 2x, but engine overhead and time investment increases by 8x. You could reduce block size by 25%, but the detail increase would only be 33% higher while increasing block count to 2.35 per the same section.

To make a smaller block set work without a massive change in player time investment and you would need a change to how the engine groups blocks and the toolset to group those blocks would need to be made. All of with would be a major change to the engine (much greater than reducing rendering size or increasing camera viewpoint).

Then the final part of what are you buying with this change? Remember size is based off perspective. Close up the detail would improve, but you mentioned stations which are typically large objects. Increasing detail by 2x would mean the blocks would leave view at half the distance you can see them currently. What is that view distance versus the games scale? I have an okay system, its not a graphic beast nor is it a potato with a monitor attached. At 500m the blocks start to lose their individuality, by 600 they start to be merged into each other. On a very high end system I could see that lasting to about 800m. The scale of starmade in a sector alone is 2km by default. So you could say in the default build at 1/4th of the sector distance you have the edge of detail.

Now if we switch that to 1/2 scale blocks that range would happen at half the distance, so at 250m you would start to lose detail. If the station is around 350m^3 then you essentially cannot see the entire stations details all at once. So you aren't gaining as much detail as you think. You gain up close, but you lose a lot at a distance. Which place do people spend more time in for the gameplay? At >500m or at <250m? I would give an educated guess that the distance they are at is about 400-800m usually which is currently the detail sweet spot with the current block size.

Now there are some graphical tricks to scaling block sizes. You don't have to make the blocks smaller, you can just double amount ofwhat you see. A wider camera view on the screen would do that. How to enforce that on all players would require a distributed mod.

 

[Kaamio]

Hm, quite possibly not worth it. My point was mostly sort of reverse miniatyrisation, as the net result would've been mainly planets and stations appearing larger and default weapon ranges longer. Which is kind of what people tend to ask for, as ships are often "too large" for the surrounding space. Sure, you can increase sector size and planet size in blocks but those bring their own set of issues...

For a ship that's not a luxury liner (= large spacious inner areas), block counts should not rise much as it doesn't really affect system blocks. Tbh I'm not sure what to say about view distance, I guess that would be an issue with multiple ships in the area as block counts per cubic kilometer increase. FOV settings above 90 degrees tend to be bad though, so using that to scale down is probably not a good idea.

Ah well. Not like it was a terribly well thought out or important idea from me mostly just some idle thoughts on the issue that maybe haven't come up before.