Decorative block positioning help (screenshot)

Hi guys!
It seems that in almost 40 minuts i couldn’t figure out how to insert the last block with the “edge” toward the center exactly like the others… any suggestion? :frowning: it’s driving me creazy

I do like your attention to detail there…

I mean, if we’re looking at this with the top of the pic as North on the compass, then you just need to take the orientation you used for the Northeast block and invert your approach… Right?

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A lot of us asked for a rotation tool or something where you can just spin the block and then place it but the developers didn’t do that… many of us are still very sad with that decision because it is just a constant WASTE of time trying to figure out how to get some of these blocks to place. And there are some that just will not place the way you want because they can’t support all orientations due to limits in the design.

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Yeah, life would be very easy if every block just had “This Side Up” and you rotated it as necessary. With my current build, I have one orientation for walls and a separate one for floors, so I can lay them more easily, because it’s all bricks so they perfectly interlock if you get it just right.

… And then I have to do Block Ninjutsu to cover the seams where they pop up.

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I think it might be better to sparingly use the words “ignored by devs” and “developers didn’t do that” (which I’ve seen from your recent posts) since things in development takes time.

It tends to entice hostility towards the developers which wouldn’t be healthy on our community. At least make it sound not final like “still haven’t developed yet”. They might be doing something more important that this request like additional contents instead of quality of life features.

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I complete get you were trying to be soft in your communication but it could come off as lecturing and condescending. There was no reason to reply to me and bring up posts making it sound like I am a problem in the community because I voice my opinion that goes against 100% supporting of the developers in a few posts. You understand that could be considered as enticing hostility as well right?

You are welcome to go back through every post I have done and tell me how many times I have used the “ignored by devs” comments. If I have been excessive in that statement then I would be fine in apologizing and adjusting it. But I have not been. I would also suggest you go count how many times I have stepped up and fully supported the devs and explained to others specifics of coding and technology and why things are like they are. Not to mention times that I completely disagree with their decision but support them in why they made that decision.

Also don’t forget that the developers have more than a few times very mentioned in written posts that they do not take strong worded comments or more polarizing opinions to heart and they in fact have asked us for stronger views. We have way too many fan boys of the game that are scared to hurt the devs feelings and have driven away players because they have opinions that are not in alignment to the fan boys.

In this case I have a right to feel that it was ignored, because it was at this point in time. People were VERY clear in their suggestion posts when we talked about fixing how placement was done before in the game and how people would like it after things were changed. A rotation tool was brought up as well as other suggestions on how placement could be done. Many went very specifically into WHY it should be done a specific way, etc.

The solutions the devs provided was a “skill” (something that people already complain that we have too many of) that basically didn’t really adjust anything in how placement was done. No one asked for a skill in any of the posts. No technical reason was provided why a skill was more pertinent to deploy in the code versus a more interactive solution that makes it EASIER for people to visualize placement and save time. (This isn’t the first time people asked for one thing and we got another - meteors is an example.)

We still have the same issue of having to try to figure it out and actually in some cases it is even harder than it was before to get placement working. Also no where in the roadmap does it show an entry to provide a better “placement” solution. So a game issue that many are frustrated with continues to stick around that did not need to.

Yes, they probably have stuff they feel is more important. But, “more important” is a relative term. For a person playing the game we want things we consider important that make our hours spent worth it and the most fun over some of the changes that have been implemented recently. For a developer “more important” means providing a rounded game experience, hence why they are putting in the stuff we have seen.

I support both of those objectives based on the context of the discussion. In the case of this post it was about quality of game experience and the placement model sucks and needs work. That is more important than something like a forge or whatever new stuff is coming in the next patch.

I will always believe that whatever is released is in the best interest of the whole game based on the view of the developers so I have to support whether I agree or not. But, I am still allowed to be critical of it because they understand how important it is and value the input for people to hold them accountable to all “contexts.”

Personally, I dont think any “really” needs 24 rotations of blocks. What I would like to champion, is instead that a large sub-group of the block types have their textures “randomnly” orientated (currently top/bottom are the same, and each of the 4 sides is the same orientation), we could set the orientations such that you can have the “pattern” of the block be at any rotation you want on any particular single facing direction (you just cannot control what orientation the other 5 faces end up as), and requires 4 rotations of the block to achieve that.

Aka we dont need a humongous migration of data, or to suddenly lose a MASSIVE scope of block-ids, and we dont have to actually change any system. AND this can even have a rotation tool which rotates the face of the block you click on so for whichever face you choose, you can set its rotation to whatever you like (but again, you cannot control what happens to the other 5 faces at the same time).

Technically, this wouldn’t actually be “rotations” but a re-arranging of the faces so that it works out as being able to rotate a single particular face (without caring what happens to other 5 faces).

Downside being that there is no way to “migrate” worlds to this new format in a way that would be pleasing to the eye in all cases, large amounts of the world would “visually” suddenly get rotated, and existing manually rotated patterns would get jumbled up in most cases, so people would have to use the rotation tool to patch up anyway that changed badly from their viewpoint.


As to why we are not doing work to allow all possible rotations on blocks right now:

The game supports 4 rotations of blocks. Being able to have any rotation (a pre-requisite of even having a tool that can manipulate the rotation in any way that any user has every suggested) would mean having 24 rotations (off the top of my head) or 48 if you include mirrorings rather than pure rotations.

We already have “no” space whatsoever left in the block metadata, and the 4 rotations of blocks are actually implemented by using 4 entirely seperate block-type ids instead. square/bevel chisseled block-variations are also another block-id too, so in fact most of our blocks currently use 12 block-ids each (4 rotations of 3 sub-shape types)

We have 15bit blocktypes (so max id is 32767), and currently use 10748 of them.

Not “every” block is rotated eg grass blocks which occupy over 9000 block-type ids already (each combination of dirt/dirt-color/grass is an independent blockid and even different height of grass is in the blockids, as the block-meta is already saturated by slope-type data, and the block-color already occupied by the grass color, so defining which dirt and which color of dirt is under the grass has to be put into the block-type id), so in terms of rotateable blocks we currently have roughly 1748 block-ids in use (so about 145 block types) .

Going up to 24 rotations, would mean those 145 block types suddenly require 10488 block-ids instead of 1748, which would take our current maximum allocated block id up to 19488.

Now 19488 “is” still in range, but we have suddenly lost " A LOT " of space for new blocks to occupy, and would only be able to have another 184 blocks roughly assuming each is rotated/chisellable. … but if you wanted mirroring of the blocks, and not just rotations, we woudl need 48 * 3 blockids for every block… and now we dont even have space for them all any more without even adding new blocks!!

Now, actually making this all work requires a humongous migration of the every chunk/item/inventory in the game as every single blockId suddenly gets massively re-distributed, and we’ve even had to do this twice already during the introduction of the bevel/square chisels, so not impossible, but a large amount of work, and quite frankly, we have more important work to do right now! (And as I say, I would much rather have the more limited system I suggest at the top which apart from being minimal in implentation time, doesnt waste such a huge amount of block-ids).

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Personally I don’t like this at all, since most of the blocks I rotate in the current system have more then one face visible. Think of door and window frames, hand rails, etc.
Plus it adds the requirement to touch each block 3 times while building. Its already time consuming to touch many blocks a second times for chiseling, but its ok because chisels are awesome.
But having to touch every block another time just to get the rotation right is going to be totally tedious.
In the current system I can get the rotation right while building just by facing in the right direction when placing the block. And since there only 4 orientations, you know how to face to get the orientation you want by heart after some time of building.

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Who said we would not still have rules to feed the orientation when placing? The rotation tool is when it gets it wrong or you want to change it after the placement.

Having more than one face visible does not “really” change anything here, right now you cannot have control over each individual face, if this was implemented, you would still not have control over each individual face. The only real difference is that with this you would be able to at least pick one of the faces to have a specific rotation, for hand-rails you can still place them all in the same of the 4 orientations to get a consistent textured rail etc…

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I have tryed everything, any orientation and any position (also digging and doing it from below covering the top with dirt etc.) :stuck_out_tongue:

So… actually this block doesn’t have the possibility to be placed how i would like, correct? the rotation i’m looking for doesn’t exist?
because if t’s not (now) possible, than I’m going to change the design :stuck_out_tongue:

Reguarding the idea of a tool i don’t really know what to say… it is cool but surely not a priority;
just avoiding designs on blocks that are not simmetrical in any axis? :stuck_out_tongue:
blocks with 1 to 2 axis of simmetry (wich can be in a + or x orientation in the block face) while this block in particular it’s not modular and has no axis of simmetry…
dunno, maybe i’m wrong but it’s really sad, because this block design is super cool :100:

To my knowledge and experience (which isn’t terribly much, except for this very specific block) there is no way to make that particular 2x2 pattern. I’m sorry :frowning: I really wish there was, it would have made my build much more beautiful if this block was fully patternable. (Is that even a word?)

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I’ve raised this question.
But developer considers the workload to be too great, and not an urgent requirement, so they chooses to shelve it.

Whilst I do find it very irksome that I can’t place all blocks in the orientation that I want, I don’t feel that it’s a high priority on my list of things to implement/improve upon
(let alone whatever is on the devs list)!

Personally, I’d rather all the core functionality was implemented before quirks like this are addressed (I’d still like to see it addressed at some point in the future, but I can wait)

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i absolutely agree, it’s not a priority in any way… i was just thinking that itt was me xD
[that’s why i chose the Creations section]

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Not just you :wink: I gave up trying to position those ones to make decorations

Thank you SOOOOOO much for the transparency of the situation around block rotation and positioning. We really need this time of explanation and participation by the developers on many things in the game. I really hope @James can work with you all to find more time to provide more detail on the challenges you all face and why some of the decisions are made the way they are. Yes it is technical but I think it can be very enlightening and would help move our conversations and the game forward in a more conducive fashion.

It helps people to have clarity on the game and shows people in a good way what can and cannot be accomplished. This allows for a more informed player base. AND in all fairness to what @lawrey was trying to communicate, it can give a larger perspective of the game design decisions and constraints which would curtail stronger or perceived hostile conversations toward the developers. That is something I do support even as critical as I can be at times.

People will always have their opinion, which can come of as very opinionated when they don’t have any information on WHY the game is done the way it is. This is true especially for very hot topics that greatly affect game play where limits are applied but no understanding on WHY it was applied. But when information is fully available then the conversation turns constructive because people can add informed suggestions on how to possibly move forward.

Thank you again for the explanation.

Personally, I would support a possible design like you talk about. Most complaints I have seen talk about the primary rotation (view) people are looking at with less concern on the other directions. Overall the greatest complaint is really just having NO idea on whether the rotation you are trying to achieve is possible. So you waste time trying to get it to work and sometimes never do. That is where the tool helps because it makes it easier to go through the sequence where sometimes you just can’t stand in the right direction to get what you need. People can rationalize a limit but have a hard time dealing with the frustration of not knowing WHERE that limit is.

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Basicly this is my suggestion: (Note, not even as random as I had said, its almost exactly the same as we have now, but some of the faces on some of the configurations are rotated a bit)

blockorientationswap2

So with only 4 configurations (which basicly match the 4 configurations we have “right now”, largely speaking we still have 2 vertical ones and 2 “sideways” ones), any of the 6 faces can have any rotation of the texture pattern. And you could use a tool to hit one of the 6 directions to rotate “that” direction 90 degrees, and even the current placement system when putting the blocks down would only require a very minor change to fit with the new orientations.

Here I had an entirely non-mirror P pattern texture, but for some of the cases atleast in the game, the texture has atleast one mirroring axis already, so 4 rotations actually does give you the 2 flips as well because of the texture already being mirrored (Eg imagine the P in this diagram is a T shape instead, or is a texture with just a diagonal line in one corner)

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– edit: updated the image above now. feel free to remove your comment.

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Hopefully the poll I put in suggestions give some data on what people are looking for and can help determine the best course of action to give more functionality but limit the need to use much of the space restrictions in games that has on bits.

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