Wedge Tool for making Ships Smoother

[Edymnion]

<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>

God yes.

I remember back when I played World of Warcraft (played it for 7 years). I remember people pining for "the good old days" of vanilla, and I was just sitting there going "Really? I was there man, vanilla sucked!"

 

[Genar]

God yes.

I remember back when I played World of Warcraft (played it for 7 years). I remember people pining for "the good old days" of vanilla, and I was just sitting there going "Really? I was there man, vanilla sucked!"

Not only World of Warcraft :D. There many games out there, mostly sandbox, where you can say the same ^^

 

[Jojomo]

Someone's just published a new tool that includes a wedging function: SMBEdit (not SMEdit)

 

[Ithirahad]

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

To be fair, third-party tools like SMEdit - when they work in the first place, anyway - get to do things that you can't do on the fly ingame simply because the server would have to use up a silly amount of resources (or stop doing other things for a silly amount of time) to get them done.

Just look at the difference between typical modern movie CGI and your typical modern video game's graphics. When execution time is not a concern, the sky isn't even the limit. :P

 

[Valiant70]

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

This would be quite difficult to code. The process of wedging is complex and actually making a lot of shapes look good can get very involved. I would like to see a feature added to build helpers to add wedges, heptas, and tetras, but anything beyond a calculated shape would be a waste of time for Schema and team. The thing is, the artwork that goes into making wedged details look right is too involved for a computer to do well. Many ship builders simply wouldn't use the tool due to inevitably poor results.

If you're not a very hardcore shipwright, complex, smooth shapes are not a requirement. Try building a ship from several simple geometric shapes and spend your time greebling (adding decorations) rather than trying to hash out a complicated base shape. I love curved hulls, but I wouldn't recommend that everyone attempt to make one.

 

[Jojomo]

This would be quite difficult to code. The process of wedging is complex and actually making a lot of shapes look good can get very involved. I would like to see a feature added to build helpers to add wedges, heptas, and tetras, but anything beyond a calculated shape would be a waste of time for Schema and team. The thing is, the artwork that goes into making wedged details look right is too involved for a computer to do well. Many ship builders simply wouldn't use the tool due to inevitably poor results.

Well that's just not true at all.
Coding wedging would be laborious, and would depend on so,e assumptions (e.g. no empty blocks adjacent to the target block on the inside of the hull) but the difficulty is low: you just look at all the adjacent empty blocks and pick the wedge that suits.

I don't claim that the tool I just posted above gives good results (I didn't write it, and haven't yet tried it, so don't know), but no, auto-wedging is not hard.