Unique names for the colored blocks

I am sure you guys are going to come up with awesome names when it comes time.

I was wondering if you could at least put a number on the name now. So many of the block colors look very similar in my invatory it is hard to keep them stright. It doesn’t even mater which has which number just some easy way of telling them appart. This would help building tremendously.

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They are all gleam blocks, but yeah it would be practical with names, however im not sure its that easy, i might be wrong, an example is that there are many colors of dirt but they are all called dirt, they dont have different colored names, im not sure its because theyhavent throught about it, or because it is hard to do.

@ben @james thoughts?

Right I am not sure if it is hard to do, which is totally understandable

It would be great even if it was just
Dirt 1
Dirt 2
Dirt 3

and so on.

that… would be weird as hell too… i think if possible i would just prefer names of the color :smile:

Oh I agree, I am just saying I would be happy with the bare minimum for now.

Let us have a think about this. It’s possible - but might become challenging depending on the # of different colours for each block. But I understand the issue.

This might also be helped with an updated GUI that we have in the pipeline. Hopefully this will make the blocks easier to visualise. (I think it does.)

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The GUI sounds great.

I am having the most trouble with the trunks and wood. As many are just a few shades off from eachother. Brown, dark brown, just a little darker brown, dark brown with a tinge of red. Don’t get me wrong I love all the variation, it is just hard to tell which is which in the inventory.

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I’m not sure if this still happens but sometimes some wood just becomes white in my inventory. Having the same name for everything doesn’t make it easier xD

It sounds like this is an inventory organization problem at its core (how do I quickly find a certain block type of a given color) - I wonder if we can tackle it from a different direction:

What if all blocks of a type are grouped together, and you had the ability to choose a particular color when you need it?

One idea:

  • The inventory shows all blocks of a type as a single entry (e.g. “Twisted Trunk”)
  • You can interact with that stack (right click?) to change its color (if you have more than one):
    • perhaps it opens a secondary menu showing all the colors & counts of each that you’ve obtained
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No i don’t like that idea it removes the whole color hunting potential.

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Ah yeah, sorry, wasn’t clear - you’d still need to hunt for colors; it’ll still only show the colors (and amount of each) that you’ve obtained

Ah yeah that would make things much easier (And make the inventory last longe)

The debug window shows a number for color

Hmm, may be an additional name pre- or suffix would be really helpful. Like lready mentioned the woods are quite difficult to differentiate. May be it gives a number (like in the debug mode) which is shown not instantly, but if a hotkey is pressed (or - if planned - in the mouse-over “more info” window).

That idea is amazing, that should become a standard feature in all voxel games. :smile:

It have been done in games before i think, only problem with this is that all of the blocks would have to stack in your inventory, now i know i say problem even though it is a good thing, but if the system is meant so 2 different types of dirt cant be stacked, then it this system would kinda ruin the point of it, wouldnt it?

The suggestion is to make a change to allow that two kinds of dirt can be stacked, but in a way that still lets the player choose the colors of dirt that they have in that stack (when they care about a color).


There are a couple cases for using items:

Crafting Blocks: E.g. twisted trunk → twisted timber. The player cares about block color here (most of the time)

Crafting Items: E.g. twisted trunk → sticks. Block color doesn’t matter here.

World Placement: The player cares about block color (most of the time)


And a couple issues w/ the current UI:

  • When I want to create something from a bunch of different colors (say, a gleam fresco), I have to fill up my bar with all the various colors of gleam; and I may not even have enough slots to cover all the colors I want to use.

  • It’s hard to distinguish blocks of different colors within a block type, as well as blocks of the same color of different types.


The hope w/ that proposed UI is that it addresses those issues, and supports the cases above:

  • Crafting items is easy: just drag the stack of the item type you care about, and away you go; you don’t care about the color.

    • It could be smart and use the most common color first, too
  • Crafting blocks either becomes:

    • Just as easy, if the stack’s “active color” is the color you want
    • If not, you have to switch the active color - so two clicks worse (but maybe the reduced time finding the block you want makes up for that)
  • Placing blocks becomes pretty easy, especially if there’s a hotkey to cycle through colors in a stack. Now your action bar could have a stack of each type, and you can juggle colors w/o even opening the inventory!


Also note that it conveniently ignores stack/inventory limits (maybe you deal with that by just having a max # of blocks allowed in the inventory?)

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Blocks of different colors should not be stackable. They are different and so need different slots. Also they should not be transformable into other colors by using them with others. That would ruin the economy which can occur with different colors from different worlds. Just make them easier to differentiate ^^

He doesn’t mean really stackable. Just grouping so it occupies only one inventory slot and when you right-click it (or something like that) you get a drop down menu with all the colors of that block you have got in that inventory.

2 Likes

Ok, that sound more reasonable. But then it may be tricky to limit the inventory size. A global limit of items in the inventory may be not a good idea, but having a limit to each stack would also lead a problem: having different stacks of items with mixed colors in each… I like the way it is handled in the moment. If we get containers there should be not a big problem in having a simplified inventory like we now are used to have.