SE2 Suggestion: Armor stretching
Hello! I was discussing this suggestion on the subreddit r/SpaceEngineers (unofficial), and was kindly made aware by a reddit user about this space where players can make suggestions, so I will make my post here too. [original post]
I will begin by saying that I'm not sure if anyone has already brought up something like this, so if it's been discussed before, my bad:
I’m a long-time player of Space Engineers, and over the years, one thing has stood out to me: there's a particular aspect of the construction system that, if improved, could seriously enhance the designing of grids, while also bringing in some QOL.
Before I dive into that, I want to introduce a smaller indie game that some of you might already know: Starship EVO. I actually discovered it through one of my favorite Space Engineers builders, Dolan, who’s uploaded some of the most impressive ships I’ve ever seen. Naturally, I had to check the game out, and I was immediately intrigued by one of its building features.
In Starship EVO, basic blocks like cubes, slopes, etc, can be stretched to the dimension you want. This seemingly simple feature makes the build menu way easier to navigate (by removing most variants of a block that can be made by stretching the original shape) and makes construction feel much more intuitive and fluid.
- NOTE: In the workshop of SE1 we already have a blueprint that expands on the available armor by deforming the base blocks, the issue is that it's unwieldy and has little practical use. Maybe a similar result can be achieved by designating the slope area (by pressing a key for example), deforming the basic blocks (instead of hand crafting each variant for each slope to save time), freezing the physical shape (to avoid it returning a cube when being repaired) and recalculating the health of each singular block based on the occupied volume?
I think this kind of system could be a relevant source of inspiration for Space Engineers 2, but anyway, just wanted to share this thought. Maybe it sparks some ideas, maybe not, but hey, I think it’d be pretty cool to see.
Thanks for reading, the Industrial Collective of Anaxes wishes you a good day. o7
I like this feedback
Another indie space game, Avorion has an even greater range of dimensions. My Avorion builds often have armor plates with proportions like 80 x 20 x 1 (and it is quite flexible, you could also use 76 x 19 x 1). Now I don't know how well such extreme cases would fit into the VRAGE 3 system, but some stretching would be helpful to let us create sleeker forms.
In some cases, the option to use half height blocks would also help, compressing the block to smaller than standard proportions. For instance, the "large grid" ramp is currently 5 m long x 2.5 m wide x 2.5 m high. If you could shrink it to 5 m long x 2.5 m wide x 1.25 m high, you could build much shallower ramps.
Another indie space game, Avorion has an even greater range of dimensions. My Avorion builds often have armor plates with proportions like 80 x 20 x 1 (and it is quite flexible, you could also use 76 x 19 x 1). Now I don't know how well such extreme cases would fit into the VRAGE 3 system, but some stretching would be helpful to let us create sleeker forms.
In some cases, the option to use half height blocks would also help, compressing the block to smaller than standard proportions. For instance, the "large grid" ramp is currently 5 m long x 2.5 m wide x 2.5 m high. If you could shrink it to 5 m long x 2.5 m wide x 1.25 m high, you could build much shallower ramps.
This is something that would instantly solve all the armor shapes problems people have (literally the most popular mods / features are more armor shapes). If on top of that they could also have a volumetric / dynamic destruction and mass calculation system for ships this way it would also make the game run 10 times better because individual blocks often make up a huge part of a blueprints memory.
This is something that would instantly solve all the armor shapes problems people have (literally the most popular mods / features are more armor shapes). If on top of that they could also have a volumetric / dynamic destruction and mass calculation system for ships this way it would also make the game run 10 times better because individual blocks often make up a huge part of a blueprints memory.
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