At some point during all of our builds we all tell ourselves that we wish we could shape glass. Even if we can’t shape it into little cubes or slopes, it would at least be nice to be able to half the glass.
This is unacceptable.Dear Devs - Please think about it.
Sincerely Yours,
Bunky
Actually, I don’t understand why they can’t be shaped. I’ve always wondered that. Even if it only made two basic shapes like halfed, or copper chiseled.
But a new trick is to use gem signs now for windows. Which tells me glass actually can be made in a way that once touching one another could make one solid looking piece.
I think one difference is the current glass is a block and the sign is a mesh. This would mean there is a limit to the number of signs in a chunk (500 mesh limit per chunk), but not for glass since it is a block.
Right now there are no limits to the amount of glass I can use, but if it was a mesh, would this create limits that would negatively affect how people can build?
blocks can be chiseled though…
if you search the forums, the developers provided reasons that glass cannot be chiseled. This has been brought up quit a bit. The only change they have made is to tweak the edge of the glass block.
Yup - signs are considered complex and you can only have so many in any given area
I think it would be acceptable to be able to at least use the square chisel on them…
if they want to save on rendering more block variations then maybe glass could be limited to half blocks or ‘slabs’ so any chisel hit to the face of a block reduces that side by half.
Glass should be thin… half blocks are a step in the right direction and better than full blocks
I can’t find a dev post to reference, but I remember one challenge is that the texturing system wouldn’t play nice: if you chiseled glass, you’d end up with invisible edges (the current texture wouldn’t stretch properly).
The system would need an overhaul to support, and also add to a fair bit of memory use & dev time for all the new texture combinations that would need to be made
I think they’re more likely to add glass panes than supporting chiseled glass (panes are on the list, at least)
with a limit to half blocks the rendering would be dead easy. it’s not like bevelled edges with an aligning pattern.
Even for half blocks, I think that’s 8x the textures needed (if they get creative and reuse some textures for some combinations). But yeah, that sounds a lot more reasonable
Allowing half-blocks would be a desired stop-gap until they develop whatever mesh system they’re expecting to implement.
I get that there’d be this magical invisible edge for the side that is half-chiseled, but I don’t care. I’d like to see what this broken invisible edge looked like before I go “yeah, never mind, I’ll wait.”
To put it bluntly: this is the technical debt.
Developers started programming game without thinking enough sides in the early days.
Now they can only use the “hard to achieve” to respond to the troubles caused by technical debt.
I know it would probably cause problems on some builds, but they could take away chiseled blocks that don’t make any sense at all, like sand, ash, gravel and mud. I get that those blocks may be natural in a sloped or bevelled form, but seriously, square chisled sand is skill nobody has
chiseling is super helpful for sand/ash/gravel/etc in order to force the block to have perfectly straight edges (for example; using sand as “carpet”)
Wow that sounds nice, it also sounds like one reason we can’t have chiseled glass.
I don’t follow the logic on that; how does being able to chisel natural blocks with a bevel or square chisel, in order to force square edges, hold back being able to chisel glass?
It’s just one solution. From what I understand, there is a trade-off atm with the amount of blocks currently supported by the game. It could be possible to remove a few variations from a few different blocks types in order to make something of higher demand, like chiseled glass, possible
I don’t believe the problem is a matter of there not being space allocated toward chiseled glass textures. The problem is how the textures interact when chiseling. For example, look at chiseled refined stone. Specifically, look at the “bevel” that goes around the texture when whole. This bevel is analogous to the frame on glass. When you hit refined stone with various chisels, that bevel texture does not map to the new edges of the block. This is fine with refined stone though, because the faces of the block are not transparent. On glass though, this would cause entire faces of the block to simply vanish, and have no definable edges. This is the technical problem with chiseling glass. It’s how the texture maps on to the glass block, not a data allocation limit.
Yep, the entire texturing system for chiselled blocks would need to be changed just to get glass to work, which is a big ask.
Although…
They do want it to happen…
There are currently 46 chisel shapes, and that doesn’t include different orientations, which would potentially put that number over a hundred, then times that by the 80 or so blocks available, and you’re looking at over 3,000 textures (at the very least) to map for poor little @jesshyland, so if you’re ever wondering why textures aren’t aligned perfectly for each chisel shape, that’s why.
@nevir already mentioned why it hasn’t been done for glass - because there is a single texture for any one block, and chiselling doesn’t so much change the texture, but simply takes a slice out of it. The result with glass would be invisible edges.
It can be done, but it’s a lot of work, and;
There are more important things right now.
Glass could potentially change again (as it’s long been a point of contention)
