"Dual-textured" blocks

First of all, I don’t really know how easy or hard this would be to implement, and this might not be the easiest to explain, but here goes…

So the idea is you can take any 2 textures (ie. marble and stones, timber and gravel, etc) and you compress them together. The first texture encompasses the top half of the block. The second texture encompasses the bottom half of the block. The result would be a block with a different texture on the top than the bottom.

This could even be taken 1 step further in allowing for a different left half and right half or a different diagonal.

The result would be a block that would allow for even more flexibility for builders than ever before. While I don’t quite know what it would take to implement this, my guess is that it would simply be a texture change. While this may make chiseling different, that could also be used to make complete new types of builds in itself.

I’d be curious to know what you guys think of this idea, or if I need to explain it further, etc.

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I suggested once that I would like it if we could chisel a block with any of the existing chisels and that we could then place a second block inside it which would only show in the chiseled away parts.

That would allow for some interesting possibilities

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Both great idea’s @silentunion and @AeneaGames :+1::+1:
But I doubt if this is possible within the limits of the game - a lot of block data to handle I think
I am still hoping (waiting) for texture - stickers; that would be nice to :thinking:

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Textures don’t actually have anything to do with block data. I don’t quite know if this is the way they’ve done it but it’s very likely:

Generally what happens with voxels is you just have the coordinates of the 8 corners and wrap the texture around. The block in that case doesn’t actually exist and it’s just the textures. This is what Minecraft does. Ever notice that if you manage to accidently “peer through” a block in Minecraft nothing’s there (ie. when loading the area around you)? That’s why. There is no actual block. lol

EDIT: Thinking about it, this is also very likely to be the same thing in this game. The actual blocks are the meshes and take more to load. This is why there is a mesh limit per chunk. :wink:

This also means that there would be no difference in block data between the dual-textured “block” and the current “blocks”. It’s a basic texture change. That’s it.

Maybe they can do double textured blocks with the sticker concept;
but i am thinking there are a lot of texture combinations to handle.
A very nice idea though

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That would be one area that I could see things having issues: the combinations. It’s really why I stated in my initial post that I don’t know if it would be possible or not as there are a lot of potential combinations in that case. That being said, there’s certainly some creative ways it could be done to minimize data usage. It really depends on what system they have in place to determine what texture belongs to what block. :slight_smile:

Glad you like the idea though.

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This is… not true, actually! Block data is all the data that tells the game what a block is - its physical properties, its chiseled shape, what happens when you mine it, and yes, its appearance - tints, foliage, light and textures. A ‘dual-textured’ block would necessarily require extra block data, and I believe we’re very tight on that for optimisation reasons.

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Can’t ya make it a new block with a new texture that’s half half?

Thanks for pointing that out!

I guess where I was coming from was when I was working in Unity at one point, I was using “blocks” that weren’t actually blocks. They were just a texture wrapped around the block. So in that case, the physical properties would actually be the texture and the points in which they would wrap.

Obviously in this case there’s chiseling so there’s more to it than that. Thanks for sharing this and giving insight into what goes on with the actual blocks. :slight_smile: