I had been a little disappointed that all my work on Akua was about to get wiped, so instead I chose to try and get blueprints of my old bases on Omicron, and try to move them over to 7.0. I found an old installation of Steam on my laptop from years ago, which had an iteration of Empyrion that didn't require Steam authentication to open it. In that, was my data from V2.2! I finally got the 2 bases saved as blueprints (it never would work before, and I didn't know why. Turns out I was nowhere near close enough to the bases to save them), and then I opened them in v7.0, with no errors! I tried spawning them on Omicron where they once had lived, but the terrain was not having it any more. I moved my efforts to Akua, found interesting places for both bases, and proceeded to place them and resume working on them again. Here is the first base: I added those white support pillars underneath to support it, but hopefully those will now help in spawning that base in the future, because they increase the base's ability to support itself, in spite of inadequacies in the terrain. After it's placed you can use the 'fill' tool on the drill to build up the ground around the pillars, so that you don't see them any more. That's what I'm doing with this base. I don't mind the pillars so much here, but I still want to try and make it look like the base was made to fit the terrain, not the other way around. I've also been working on replacing hundreds and hundreds of armored windows that are not even technically supposed to be used on bases any more, like small steel blocks and small windows. The only windows available at the time were shuttered, and NO triangular windows, so I had to use those, and supplement them with triangular cement blocks to fill in the holes. It looked pretty bad, but now I can update all of these buildings to have much better-looking windows! It's been a lot of work, but it's been very much worth it. This is how I've wanted my bases to look for over 2 years now! here's a before and after, to illustrate this. It's not the same view both times, but you get the idea. It's the end of the same section of the base, and you can't really even tell. Oh yeah, I also added a balcony! Hooray for railing blocks! And here's the entire thing, showing my progress in window-replacing. I'm about halfway there, I guess! Meanwhile, speaking of window-replacing, the city base down in the valley got a good start on that: ...along with a few hundred more paving blocks. I still have a loooong way to go, just to update what's already there, before I add anything to this base. You can see my progress with the windows here: The tall building has lights that are grouped per floor, so it's relatively simple to change the colors on an entire floor at once. I'm eventually going to have rainbow colors going up the entire building. I can't wait to see what it's going to look like when the city is all lit up at night! That will make it all worth it. I'm thinking of paving this entire valley, making it one great big city!
The first 10 floors of the rainbow tower are done, just 10 more to go! This is technically 40 floors, not 20, but it only has 20 levels of windows.
There is now a new building in the city-base. The red rectangle marks the spot where I placed the anchor blocks, for the next building. Since this city basically exists on a steel plate over a lake, and sinkholes have occurred, I'm making sure to take the building foundations all the way down through the street level, into the bedrock to make sure collapses don't happen. Here's a closeup of the top. The main part of the building is fairly straightforward, with a few balconies, but the top of this one makes it different. The top 8 levels are all glass. I was worried it would collapse before I finished it, but it seems surprisingly strong. In that picture you can see 3 of the 5 balconies. Here's the view from the top one: ...And one picture from the inside of the glass enclosure on top: I've since changed the access to the top balcony by making that bottom row of slanted windows go straight up and down, but other than that the view here is the same. I love this game... I can't wait until there's an entire city to fly around in, not just three buildings. I also need parks, parking decks, a municipal pool, hospitals, a round restaurant space needle-type building overlooking the harbor, a bridge, and numerous smaller buildings, not just skyscrapers. I have so much work to do, but I'm having so much fun...
As long as the developers don't reset the terrains again for a long, long time so I can work on these bases, I'll wash the windows every day. Seriously though, it's going to take me a long time to build the entire city. Even when the available blocks are filled, I still want to expand the city by raising the edges up a level, and maybe even a third, to cover more ground. I want this to be huge by the time it's done! I'm in the process of adding a 3-tiered restaurant/nightclub/bar, attached to an adjacent block which houses a hotel. I've finished the bottom, restaurant level. The middle level will be slightly smaller, and the bar on top will be smallest. All 3 sections will have a covered walkway linking them to one of the floors of the hotel. That is the plan, anyway.
Well, the hotel adjacent to the sky-high bar & grill is almost done. You can also see the bridge that just got completed, in the foreground. I can't decide whether to make the top part 2 gigantic rooms, or continue the pattern I already have, and make 3 more rooms on each side, for a total of 6 rooms up there. I'm honestly leaning toward making it two large rooms, one on each side. That would continue the pattern of rooms getting bigger as they go up the building. Right now there are 14 regular rooms, 2 cheapo efficiencies, 2 units with a little extra space, and front facing windows, and two with a huge extra balcony, extra space, and front-facing windows. All units, even the smallest ones, have at least one balcony. I'm honestly leaning toward making the entire top part just two huge units, and continue the trend. Otherwise I'll have another efficiency on each side, two more regular rooms, and two more with a little extra room. ...The pattern will restart. Yes, I think about this way too much, but I love the feeling when you're walking (or flying) through a city, where attention was paid to detail. It's not just a backdrop, and I like that. You can go into each hotel room, and the view/interior is different. They all have their own character. Here's the view from the balcony of one of the two biggest units right now: There's definitely a nature side of the building, which overlooks the bridge/bay area, a lake (the sea?), mountains, etc. The other side is the city view, overlooking most of the major buildings. Here's what the rooms look like on the inside. The room on the right is unfinished in this picture, the one on the left is one of the two largest units currently, with 2 balconies: And here's a better look at the inside of it: The only things missing are a paint job, and a railing on one stairway. There's no way currently to add one. I wish that there were either stairways that already had railings attached, or parallel railings on a single block. there should be room, but I'm using a 'wall' section building block, which takes up the whole block. Outside that wall is a hallway, and then the other half of the building is mirrored from the first half, which means that I can't put the block on the hallway side for convenience, as I'd need to do that for the other side as well, which would be impossible. Speaking of impossibility, I'm now understanding that there will be likely no way to link a walkway to the nightclub over the restaurant to the hotel building in the same way that the restaurant is linked, because the distance will be too great without support, and there won't be any way to support it that I have yet devised. Oh well, I can always use teleports to link them. That might be kinda cool, actually. I wish it was seamless on the same playfield, and didn't go to a load screen, but still pretty cool to see your warp target way over there, and then suddenly be there. More soon!
Well the hotel with attached restaurant/nightclub/bar is now mostly complete! I figured out fairly early on that I wasn't going to be able to link the middle and top sections of the entertainment complex to the hotel for various reasons, so I knew I would have to provide access from the restaurant somehow. I was going to use teleports or elevator blocks to accomplish this, but decided to try a staircase, instead. It worked out pretty well, I think. Here it is going through the restaurant: I had to take out one overhead light to make way for a railing, and remove one table to make way for the bottom staircase, but the stairway looks pretty good I think. I painted it black, when it ran through the nightclub. That's 5 buildings done! The skyline is starting to come together! Now to move onto the next major building project, the red rectangle pictured here:
Here's a closeup of the loft rooms, at the top of the hotel: ...And the view from the couch in this room: Oh, and the mountain base is completely refurbed on the outside, but the inside still needs some work:
Building #6 was just completed, at least on the outside. Yes, that's a mini Greek-style temple on top, with a little garden. This building is actually a museum/library, with 'books' in various formats on shelves, with reading areas on each main floor. I still need to add the book shelves, lights, and desks/reading areas. I wish there were decorative bookshelves that already had books in them, but they would have to either come with a ton of variants, or allow a pretty deep level of user customization. I of course would prefer the latter. Even though I had trouble copy/pasting, and also pasting from a list, that building would have taken me at least a week before, and I basically built it in a day. Here's the current view from the balcony at the home base in the mountains:
