Wedge Tool for making Ships Smoother

[Genar]

Good evening !

I think we all got the same problem. We are playing on a server or even in singpleplayer... gathering resources and building bases and ships. At some point we all want to create something bigger, maybe a titan ship or a majestic base. That isnt so hard to do, you can import a modell using smedit or just build it on your own, the only hard part is to make it look smooth and nice using wedges and corners.
First you may think its easy to do but some hours later you recognize that its a lot of work and you also get bored by doing it. And by getting bored you are losing your motivation and finally you are stopping to wedge your awesome titan ship/base.

Thats why i think it would be great, if there would be an automatic wegde tool ingame for starmade. This would allow the players to create great, smooth and good looking ships in a few hours without getting bored of placing wedges. The player should be able to select an area, when selected the tool removes the exterior blocks and replaces it with the fitting wegdes/corners.

What do you think about it ?

Have a great day ! Genar

 

[Sachys]

Anybody building a titan or a majestic base should be prepared for all the work involved - including wedging.

If you can't be bothered with the work, you do not deserve it.

 

[decurr]

It would also be nice to add smoothing into the Build Helper tools. Probably as a selectable option.

 

[Genar]

The problem is that many of those players dont have the time for all the work included. There many players, which really like this game but they cant afford hours per day just to finish big ships. So a auto wedge tool would be great for all players which wanna build in a short amount of time big and smooth ships.

 

[Gonzalo]

Anybody building a titan or a majestic base should be prepared for all the work involved - including wedging.

If you can't be bothered with the work, you do not deserve it.

so what? that doesnt mean it cant be made easier. very narrow minded thinking right here.

 

[Genar]

Ya and it would be great if something like that would be easier. Thats my opinion. Its a pitty that smedit is "dead". It had so much potenzial.

 

[Edymnion]

Anybody building a titan or a majestic base should be prepared for all the work involved - including wedging.

If you can't be bothered with the work, you do not deserve it.

Let me be as polite as I can be right now while frustrated with crap at work...

This is complete and utter BS.

"If you can't be bothered with the work"?, really? Really? Do you never use the axis mirror tool? Do you never use the Remove/Replace tool? Do you never use the Build Helper? Do you never use the advanced build tools to put down more than one block at a time?

Because what you're saying is basically "If you don't place every single block by hand in astronaut mode, you suck and don't deserve to be playing this game", and that is incredibly condescending. Especially when I will bet money right now you use the effort saving tools we have now when you build.

I mean, seriously, there is a huge difference between "Make the game do everything for me" and "Could we get a tool that makes the tedious crap a little easier to do?".

 

[Lone_Puppy]

This is a great suggestion! Something I've always wished for. I hope Schine can fit it into their busy schedule, if they haven't already planned for it.

 

[Sachys]

while frustrated with crap at work...

I didnt say anything as you suggested.

 

[Edymnion]

I didnt say anything as you suggested.

You literally said that anyone making a titan or station needed to be prepared to "do all the work, including wedging" and that if you "can't be bothered" to do the work, "you don't deserve to have it", so yes, yes you did say that.

You literally said that if you aren't willing to put in the work to wedge something by hand, that you don't deserve to have it.

In a thread requesting to have a tool to make wedging less tedious. You made the argument that something that removes tedium or makes a process faster and easier shouldn't be included because then people didn't "earn it" because they didn't "work for it". While you use the exact same tools we already have that serve the exact same purpose.

Thats why its BS. Tools to make design/building easier don't make you "not deserve to have it", no more than using the mirror axis makes you "not deserve to have it" because you were "only" willing to put in "half the work" and wanted to let the computer do the other half of the job for you.

Designing it is the work, not physically placing the blocks.

 

[Sachys]

I am glad to see your work frustrations have neither skewed your view, not your ability to prevent yourself from thinking too deeply on a simple opinion that did not encapsulate that which you have injected into it.

- and yes, the design is the work, therefore, wedging (in my opinion) should remain as it is - not only to AID design (ie decoration etc, and prevent a spiral into a "photoshop filter effect" level of design in ships), but also to preserve the pace of building massive things in the game such as titans.

If a popular vote says otherwise and the devs put it in, well then I guess I lose. On the other hand, if I dont speak my mind on the matter, then I would regret such a missed opportunity should it arrive in game.

If you don't agree with me, thats fine, but dont go off like that - there is no need.

* * * * *
Now, on the other hand, were this tied ONLY to creative mode, then I would have less reason to oppose it, as its use would be limited to single player, shipyards and creative sectors on the servers that supply them - and those who are building titans would still have to mine and manufacture to get their lag bricks.

 

[Shadow2Lead]

I'd love to see this, but... two problems off the top of my head.

1. This would require the game to understand what is the inside and what is the outside of your ship. Both in the sense of the general shell but also not smoothing insides of hangers and hallways. Maybe designate areas to be smoothed from a given angle?
2. It'd have to be implemented perfectly. To be fair this is kind of true of everything, but i think it'd be very frustrating for areas to be smoothed incorrectly.
3. Building off two, there are choices in smoothing. Personally i almost never use corners, preferring tetras. There are also choices have cutting in to place tetras and it's inverse or placing tetras where there was no block. Perhaps the smooth tool could allow you to check off what block types it can use?

 

[PLIX]

it would be tough to impelent but it would be great for players who dont have time to make their ships wedged out it would make the ship look better but not by a whole lot i personally never found wedging to be tedious cause i wedge WHILE building the structure itself it would be great but not used too oftenly cause if your building a huge ship alone you can save by just simplifying the detail but if youre working in agroup you can put lots of detail and spend less time altogether once you built the first ship you can copy paste it across most servers and multiple rimes each and ifthats the case id take the time to actually make the ship look good with manual wedges rather than the less accurate version suggested so i agree it would be a good feature but i can see Sachys's point of view as easily although how he expressed it made iit seem like fascist propaganda

 

[Lone_Puppy]

I'd love to see this, but... two problems off the top of my head.

1. This would require the game to understand what is the inside and what is the outside of your ship. Both in the sense of the general shell but also not smoothing insides of hangers and hallways. Maybe designate areas to be smoothed from a given angle?
2. It'd have to be implemented perfectly. To be fair this is kind of true of everything, but i think it'd be very frustrating for areas to be smoothed incorrectly.
3. Building off two, there are choices in smoothing. Personally i almost never use corners, preferring tetras. There are also choices have cutting in to place tetras and it's inverse or placing tetras where there was no block. Perhaps the smooth tool could allow you to check off what block types it can use?

Hey great observations. I wonder if you could address the inside/outside issue using some kind of focus beam tool to collide with the side you want smoothed. That way you would be telling the game the surface to smooth. Could use the planet and asteroid terrain algorithm with some advancement for wedging.
[doublepost=1481623621,1481623422][/doublepost]Oh almost forgot.
Apply the surfacing algorithm to use slabs and perhaps anything.

Reminds me of old ASCII and text conversion of images. Perhaps use similar techniques.

 

[Genar]

I'd love to see this, but... two problems off the top of my head.

1. This would require the game to understand what is the inside and what is the outside of your ship. Both in the sense of the general shell but also not smoothing insides of hangers and hallways. Maybe designate areas to be smoothed from a given angle?
2. It'd have to be implemented perfectly. To be fair this is kind of true of everything, but i think it'd be very frustrating for areas to be smoothed incorrectly.
3. Building off two, there are choices in smoothing. Personally i almost never use corners, preferring tetras. There are also choices have cutting in to place tetras and it's inverse or placing tetras where there was no block. Perhaps the smooth tool could allow you to check off what block types it can use?

Good morning !

Ya i also thought about that, but thats "easy" to solve. Im currently programming a 2D rouge like dungeon crawler and i used some different algorythms to make the Walls looking smooth. Its also possible to give each side of a block an "flag" which tells you if the block is interior or exterior. Also you could use an fill algorythm for determining which block is inside or outside.

If its "to much" work for the developers they also could ask the community for help. Or they just could make their game modable with a nice mod interface.

This ingame tool really could need a options menu for selecting How you want to wedge it, in case that the user dont want corners and just tetras.

Im also very happy, that many players agree with my idea and i hope that some of the developers will read this Thanks for your feedback ! Feel free to comment ! ^^

 

[Az14el]

Seconded this!

a good 5k hours sunk into this game, conservatively speaking (steam hit 1800 by the time i stopped launching from there nearly 2 years ago)
off the top of my head I'd break that into 4k hours of build mode, 900+ grinding for resources, <100 hours interacting with other players/the environment. I've finished maybe a dozen ships in that time.

If the games essentially an engineering/design sandbox for the time being, fine, it's got a long road map ahead of it and all the good stuff needs a groundwork. That side of it could be made soooooo much smoother and I'm sure everyone would have a lot more content to contribute as far as in game assets.

 

[Jojomo]

Good evening !

I think we all got the same problem. We are playing on a server or even in singpleplayer... gathering resources and building bases and ships. At some point we all want to create something bigger, maybe a titan ship or a majestic base. That isnt so hard to do, you can import a modell using smedit or just build it on your own, the only hard part is to make it look smooth and nice using wedges and corners.
First you may think its easy to do but some hours later you recognize that its a lot of work and you also get bored by doing it. And by getting bored you are losing your motivation and finally you are stopping to wedge your awesome titan ship/base.

Thats why i think it would be great, if there would be an automatic wegde tool ingame for starmade. This would allow the players to create great, smooth and good looking ships in a few hours without getting bored of placing wedges. The player should be able to select an area, when selected the tool removes the exterior blocks and replaces it with the fitting wegdes/corners.

What do you think about it ?

Have a great day ! Genar

if you're importing via SMEdit, you know SMEdit already has this function, right? it will do your wedging for you.

I use TBterra s tool for importing though, so I'd love to see your suggested automatic wedging in game....

 

[Edymnion]

if you're importing via SMEdit, you know SMEdit already has this function, right? it will do your wedging for you.

Yup, which means it can't be THAT difficult to do.

 

[Genar]

Yep SmEdit has this function. But SmEdit is outdated and very unstable, it often crashes, cant load blueprints, only binvox files etc. But the wedging worked fine, smedit only had problem on close passages. So i really hope we will all see this one day implemented in game...

 

[Karride]

...

"If you can't be bothered with the work"?, really? Really? Do you never use the axis mirror tool? Do you never use the Remove/Replace tool? Do you never use the Build Helper? Do you never use the advanced build tools to put down more than one block at a time?

<old spacer voice> Look here sonny, us old timers played back when advanced build mode didn't exist and we didn't have all these new-fangled corner pieces....much less tetras and heptas! and we did just fine! </old spacer voice>

And as someone that experienced that, I'll say that this old timer supports anything that helps complete some of the more shall we say, mundane tasks of building.