For Building -- Option to set the rotation axis to the normal of the surface you are looking at

Discussion in 'Suggestions' started by Eti, Aug 30, 2020.

  1. Eti

    Eti Ensign

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    Right now, rotating parts for building is annoying, especially when creating more complex combinations of shapes. The current keybind system, while straightforward, is irritating because it's often difficult to remember what order I need to press the buttons in. I very frequently find myself making the wrong rotation and correcting myself far more often than I actually get the right rotation, which means I'm spending most of my time trying to get the right orientation. On top of this, I find that only a single block needs a given orientation before I must place my next block, which means I have to constantly press a number of keys to go back and forth between different orientations.

    My proposed solution is relatively simple, and is a system familiar to many other cell-based building games.
    1. The active axis of rotation should be set to the axis-aligned normal of the cell you're looking at. I've implemented something like this, and the basic idea is to raycast to the visible geometry. If you hit the visible geometry, create a box collider in that cell, and raycast again. The surface normal is the one acquired from the box collider. It's very easy to implement!
    2. Building components should have a default bottom surface (easily discernible by their default rotation). EDIT: I forgot the strike-through text there is already a feature with the hexagonal bottom on blocks when placing them.
    3. Rotation in this mode can be controlled with two buttons to rotate clockwise or counterclockwise on the axis. In an ideal case, I would bind this to the scroll wheel, but the current setup of the game makes that not ideal.

    This building method doesn't require me to remember what buttons to press and in what order (I'm not as good as Stanley is when it comes to that) and also makes building complex geometry considerably faster and easier as I now only need to remember to look at the surface I want to rotate on (which feels natural, at least to me) and press one of two buttons to rotate it clockwise or counterclockwise.
     
    #1
    Last edited: Sep 12, 2020
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  2. Ambaire

    Ambaire Captain

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    You should check out Dual Universe. Game has a really good building system.. way better than Empyrion's.
     
    #2
  3. Eti

    Eti Ensign

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    If I wanted to find another game, I'd be on the Steam store, not asking for a new feature on Empyrion's forums :p
     
    #3
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  4. Germanicus

    Germanicus Rear Admiral

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    Sure, sure...don't forget to include into such an advice that DU requires a subscription while one is BETA-Testing the game (3 months I believe Xcal stated).. OR...just don't give such an advice at all:mad:
     
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  5. Kassonnade

    Kassonnade Rear Admiral

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    This would become difficult at short distance from the blocks. On large builds this means we would have to constantly move back and forth to see proper face to aim at.

    What do you mean by "building components" ? All blocks already have a "bottom" surface made of small hexagons. I surely don't want blocks to rotate by themselves (how does a block know it has to go one way or another?) as we already have to decide rotation. If it's a complex rotation (assymetric blocks) to fit on the "mirror" side and the block decides to switch its rotation by itself after this just because the block gets close to another one... I would not be happy.

    When we have to rotate a block 180 degrees it means 2 clicks, one way or the other. There are 3 axis, and that means choosing which key to press (clockwise or counterclockwise) then press another key (rotate) once... or twice. The actual system also allows to just use one direction (ex. clockwise) and press 1 or 2 times to get desired axis. Very hard to get mixed up this way, and spares some fingers for other keys (and keybinds too).

    So if you're on the side of a block and want to rotate it around the vertical axis, you would have to move yourself down/ up to be able to look at the bottom or top face to enable rotation along that Y axis. I prefer the actual system where you can stay in the same spot and only focus on placing the block with "aim" and chosse axis visually relative to the neighbour blocks.

    There is also sequence of actions to think about when "building". Having to rotate a block 'A' each two blocks to fit between 'B' blocks, for example, means some actions may be needlessly redundant and another method could be used, like placing all 2nd blocks then placing the "rotated" block all at once at proper rotation, or making better use of the copy/ paste functions, etc. In fact there are a great variety of building methods, all useable already with the actual system, and not one case can fit all build situations. I would like to be able to bind the mousewheel to what I want, and that's about the only "option" I would really see making a difference in building.
     
    #5
  6. Eti

    Eti Ensign

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    I suppose in the context of on-foot building this does pose a problem. In the context of drone building, however, I say it's perfect. Going above or below blocks is trivial, let alone navigating around the construction.

    I'm not sure I follow what the complaint here is. Could you elaborate? And yes, I did forget about the hexagonal bottom. My mistake. I'll edit my OP to reflect on this.

    Ideally this video of me building something in Robocraft helps to assist what I mean when I propose this idea since I get the feeling that you misunderstood a small part of it (but I don't know. You tell me). Consider if I had to build this same shape in Empyrion - I would not be able to do it nearly as quickly as I did here (let's just factor in block placement itself) because I have more axes to remember to rotate on, whereas under this system I just look at the surface I want to rotate on.

    And do note -- the feature request calls for an option to use this method. No worries about overriding the default method that so many people are used to.

     
    #6
    Last edited: Sep 4, 2020
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  7. Shepard Commander

    Shepard Commander Ensign

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    I'm Commander Shepard, and this is my favorite suggestion on this forum.
     
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