I’ve been thinking for a while about creation tool ideas that I consider essential to be in Blokoto by its final release version (1.0). In this case, my idea is to have tools that can be used from worldbuilding in maps, to models, and even avatars.
Here they are:
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Move/Paint/Delete/Build in Bulk: Basically the core tools of Blokoto, but usable in bulk. These three are important, especially the bulk move tool, since it’s possible for a player to create something very complex in modeling, only to realize a mistake afterwards that would normally force them to start all over again (like miscounting blocks, for example).
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Stretch: This is similar to the bulk move tool, but the difference is that this one leaves a trail of blocks in the shape of the blocks that are on the edge where they’re being separated — in other words, as if the object were being stretched in that region.
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Paint Brush: A variant of the paint tool, but now you can adjust its painting range.
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Spray: Another variant of the “paint” tool. In this one, you paint objects as if using a spray, where some blocks within the range won’t be painted, creating a gradient effect on the edge of the brush.
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Terrain Smoothing Brush: I believe this one might be the hardest to implement, but it’s worth a try. Basically, it’s a brush (with adjustable range in the options) that, when applied over a surface of blocks, smooths the terrain by creating modeled organic shapes. It’s a useful tool for those who work a lot with worldbuilding, helping make terrains less blocky.
For now, these are the ideas I remember. If I come up with more, I might edit this to add them.
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I know this could be a meme, but the block face painting is very useful in every aspect when building, and i can say this because of all my experience doing that when building, and imagine the awesome combination of this along the 3 layers actually present in game.
Within this feature, our creativity climb one more step up i guess, and probably everyone whose want to make a single painted block, sometimes is completely subject to do some awkward tricks to reach the desired result, and of course the player has to use a block to make this visual trick.
And as all of people knows, a possibly affordable point to build can be totally useless because of a trick to make it looks like a painted face, but actually is not that, and obviously you can argue something like “But we have 3 building layers to do stuff, this is not a problem”, well, you’re almost right, but that’s only 3 layers, and not 10 of them, so when spending 1 entire layer for one single trick of painted face, you are also killing potentially a half of your real creativity on it.
This is actually a technical decision in order to keep the codebase simple. Painting faces means that every single block would have 8 times the data and, therefore, can take more resources and computing power to process. This is not a very big deal, but in order to keep a simpler architecture for the game and a better maintainability to the codebase, I decided to discard this functionality.
It’s kind of sad thing i must agree, mostly when i know that the game don’t have a good financial base to remain stable and with a lack of worrying about problems related to how much money is needed to maintain it. But if someday this game has the necessary and could reach this higher status, i think is nothing too far away to become real, with the fact that the whole technical structure can be even better to hold on this heavy process.