So I’ve been playing a bit of Minecraft recently, and have been regularly frustrated by attempting to use stairs in in conjunction with each other around corners, and especially upside down or without creative mode to try and get that ‘perfect angle’ you need to be at to place a block that ends up in the orientation you wanted.
It occurred to me that with the chisel system that boundless has, maybe using a different material of chisel could cut out “Eighths” of a block at the clicked corner instead of slopes. That way you could do way with stair blocks entirely, and horizontal and vertical slabs…
I then noticed the concept already existing as part of this topic very old topic: Square Chisel. I’m just wondered if 2 years down the line, anything had changed (you know, beyond porting the entire game from JS to C++)?
Is it still something relegated to “never happening”, or does the C++ engine potentially provide capacity for this? It there some compromise to be made where instead of actually chiselling a block and altering it’s state, the act of chiselling it could convert it into a literally different, block given these assets for stairs already exist (although I haven’t entirely thought through the implications of then breaking that block…)?
I saw that one too, but figured the one I linked to was the most recent dev response on the subject.
That’s sort-of the principle I was going for. Although not so much as a micro detailing, just a way to try and add more functionality to chisels, and to provide a more user-friendly experience in setting up or orienting the existing stepped blocks.
I suppose another option would be to have some chisels rotate blocks 90deg instead of chiselling things off. That might help enough without any major code revisions required at all, but the ability to chisel off corners of blocks seems to more thematically work with the current chisel system.
I think we’re very unlikely to get true microblocks due to the memory overhead required for allowing microblocks of differing block types (that’s effectively 8x the memory cost, worst case - which would be particularly impactful for the servers). Square chisels are probably more reasonable (possibly 1 bit overhead per block), since the block is all one type of material.
James’ comment makes it sound like it’s not out of the realm of possibility, but probably something that would be post 1.0:
My hunch: it would probably require a fair bit of dev & artist time to set up the textures/meshes to support it
Yeah, the intention of my suggestion wasn’t to allow mixing of block types. When you get to that point, it might have been worth asking the question “why not just leave blocks as they are and have characters be twice as big?”
1 bit might be rather the underestimate, you’d probably be looking at 1 byte considering there would be eight different chisel-able corners, which can be either on or off. Though you could definitely render it as a full block in distant chunks, to save resources.
Quite possibly, yes. Although if they did do a prototype of this functionality, they already have many of the assets required for blocks that can already be made into slabs, stairs etc etc.
Ultimately, if the answer is “no”, or “not now”, that’s fine. It’s just something that vexes me greatly in voxel based games, and is also something that doesn’t seem to have been talked about for a couple of years.