Alpha 47 Tell Me What You Hate About The Building And Module Creator

A few annoyances:

1) Can't remove parts of a building blueprint.

2) After placing the blueprint and switched to module placement colonists will already immediately start trying to build the structure unless you pause. Really the building construction order should hold off until after dropping out of module mode again, having colonists dumping construction goods and depending on the size/distance of the resources even finishing construction before you've planned out all the modules unless you resort to pausing the game everytime you build something is somewhat frustrating.

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3) When you align the rotation of a module it will change its rotation seemingly at random if you drag it to the edges of the building blueprint. This can get very annoying when trying to place things against walls and having to constantly rotate modules back how you had them multiple times until the game doesn't force a new rotation on them.... unless the object is something that is placed on/inside the walls like doors/windows/pictures then no module should have its rotation forcibly changed by the game. Really. There's no need for it.

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4) When placing windows/doors/loading bays on walls the exact length of that module, it causes all sorts of weirdness and breakage. E.G. If you place a window on a 1 grid length section of wall one of 3 things will happen:

* That section of wall will have part of the mesh (usually the top tri) become invisible and the window externally will show solid wall through the panes.

* The wall will remain in tact but the window will show a solid wall when looking through it externally, and will show the outside when looking through it internally.

* The window won't display, leaving a giant hole in the wall.

Similar weirdness occurs when placing doors on a 1 grid length wall, or placing a loading bay door on a 2 grid length section of wall. Same applies to if you build a door/window/bay on a corner.

If you want such modules to work fine you need to always make sure there is always at least 1 empty wall section either side of a module otherwise various problem may occur.

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5) Placing a window next to a door/loading bay causes all sorts of weird clippage.

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6) I suspect this is largely a big motivation for reworking the system already, but module click detection is just broken.

 

You can't?

Weird, works fine for me.

 

I hate having to lay out my kitchen, carpentry shop etc. and all the modules every time I start a new colony even though I use the same designs 99% of the time. It would be incredibly helpful if the building UI had an option to save a layout (including modules) so that I could just pull it up again any time.

 

D'oh! Indeed it is. I have no idea how I missed that.

 

Yeah, I have to echo this, as someone who has been known in previous versions to pause and designate eight buildings immediately on game start, then guide the colonists through acquiring the materials needed. (I know this isn't particularly optimal, but there we are. )

 

I would also like the option to queue up buildings and modules before I have the required materials on hand. I understand that was disabled to avoid confusing new players? Perhaps it's possible allow players to queue up stuff in advance, given informed consent? Like a one-time checkbox during game configuration, or a warning window that you don't have the components on hand, or something.

 

Seems like you already have a good list Nicholas, i'll give 47 a whirl and see if i can add anything to your list

One "nice thing to have" if you have time, or some time in the future is :
Save the building template

When we're expected to build rows of houses when ownership kicks in it would be nice to have the ability to just copy paste buildings

About adjacent buildings, i've seen some z-fighting and roof clipping, but what/how do you plan to fix exactly ?

 

You can only do it with keyboard keys, which you cant remap (non-qwerty users are kinda shafted by this)
Middle mouse button to rotate doesnt work in building mode

 

That makes a lot more sense.

 

Well, there is a kind of idiom here I've seen in some other games. Click once (and release) where you want the first part of the rectangle to be. Now moving the mouse counts as the "drag". Click again once the rectangle is the right size. That cancels the "drag" and places the zone. Right click just cancels. This could be made context sensitive, assuming that the player doesn't generally want to make a 1x1 building and so using "toggle" rather than "drag" when the player seems to ask for one, as would happen interpreting this in the "drag" sense.

 

Yeah for a while to move camera i was juggling around my keyboard (even switching to qwerty in windows doesnt quite do the trick) until i found out you could move the camera with right mouse and rotate it with middle mouse.

 

Not a fan of the idea of making it less straight forward mouse wise to do area blueprinting for the sake of touch inputs, especially not a "Double click to start area mapping" as that's not really intuitive at all and would probably make area mapping even more clunky for the inputs it's meant to make things easier for.

Perhaps a better middle ground could be to keep to the basic established norms and have something like shift act as a state-toggle between individual cell placement and area placement?

No shift held = Individual cell placement.
Shift held = Area mapping/fill.

 

Aha, you know I just realized that we were moving modules by dragging the corner and letting the game snap it (especially with putting inside-outside modules into tight areas etc.

 

I wonder if knowing that makes things easier to control...

 

It probably would actually. Like if you imagine trying to place a cot for example, you'd behave differently if you know you were rotating it about the end rather than the middle (like you'd expect).

But no matter, changing it to the middle is great and more intuitive (also reduces effect of game's snapping behavior)

 

Does this apply to blueprint placement as well?

As I've always found blueprint placement tends to snap to the nearest grid vertex rather than to the actual grid square the cursor is in.

Wasn't a problem after I picked up on it way back and began expanding blueprints out from the vertex points, but the odd time I forget it can be quite annoying to click in a grid square to drag a blueprint out and it bases itself off some other point seemingly according to whatever vertex point is closest to the cursor.

Crude example, each colour inside the grid represents a click event. Then the same colour at a grid vertex point reflects where the game seems to actually start the blueprint off from:



Then with each example when attempting to drag out the blueprint from the click event, what you actually get at the moment may be something like:



or



Leaving a significant disconnection from where the player clicked which is much more likely to be where they wanted the first blueprint cell to be, and the origin point the game is actually using to expand out from.

 

I would really like to see (now that I think of it) a way of prioritizing the build queue a little bit. Maybe not going for a whole queuing system, but maybe have the "construct building" job listed in the JOBS menu. Maybe make the jobs menu order-able through dragging the items around, or a similar system to the kitchen/workshops etc. I realize it's a bit of a task to make that work.