Improve the shovel mechanics and voxel smoothing.

Kieran Martin shared this feedback 5 years ago
Submitted

Please improve the way the shovel works in survival, it is buggy as hell and you can't smooth things great and the terrain tools work worse than doing it free handly, you get these gaps of air pockets when changing or leveling terrain it makes it hard to build a farm plot or level terrain for precise flat building.


I am not saying add gravity or anything but if you are wanting to improve the game focus on this soon. I will list some problems I have found both with the terrain leveling tools and shovel and leave it up to the community and devs to work something out to fix the issue.


Leveling Tools

Great idea, however the pane to show the selection gets in the way of raising terrain it needs to be more transparent or have some kind of toggle switch either with key bind or tool to hide the panel when your filling in the terrain


My Idea

I personally think having it so the pins you put in the ground have markers above them at a visible statute would be better then have something in your workspace. maybe one of those google waypoint markets or a beam of light going up would work fine.


Shovels

If you fix the terrain tools then that's great one less thing but there is another issue with terrain and that's the mechanics of how soil is placed using shovels. I don't know if its just the voxel mechanics or if its built into the shovel its self but when you place soil down it creates air pockets or sharp points may it may it be with the leveling tool or freehandedly.


If it's the mechanics I would strongly advise reworking this as its going to hold back your game from reaching its full potential if it requires an update just based on voxels and terrain manipulation then so be it. If it's just the shovel I would find a better way of adding/removing soil, I could care less about advanced mechanics like gravity but that would be cool in the far future to be implemented but I would focus on just fixing the issues rate now.


Also, the shovel seems to have an issue where it will place soil but not raise the terrain however if you place it next to the spot after it will rais the terrain up like 1ft


My Idea

If you have to rework the system maybe think about using a grid-like system rather based on areas that raise 1in at a time rather then 1ft maybe having a more precise moded to work with terrain maybe holding ctrl or another key bind to have smaller amounts of soil raise rather than 1ft as 1ft can be useful for major changes to terrain.


The last thing I can think on how to fix the issue is rather than having the option to place the sold on walls and floors just have it on floors and build up rather than have it be able to build out. this would be a quick fix for the time being but keep the digging mechanic the same so you can make tunnels etc, but make it so you fill it in from the ground up. As I think it may just be an issue with placing the soil on walls and not flat terrain witch terrain is not flat to start with so that may be the cause. hence the level system mentioned prior where it fills chunks rather than areas.

Replies (1)

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If bizarre landscapes are your thing, then leave the voxel tools alone. But most of us are looking for a painless way to smooth the landscape. The stakes, rope, and shovel require a lot of grinding with very little reward. I like the voxel shapers but they are so squirrely. You should be able to lock the voxel brush to a certain elevation regardless of player position. I tried every combination of settings to try and get the thing to smooth a bit of terrain. Maybe you guys can do it easily, but you made the tools. To us, the thing seems to be hit and miss and the results can be catastrophic.

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