Space Engineers has always missed some basic building blocks.

Below I have attached an image of some of the basic blocks you can make using corners and half-way stops along each edge.

The ones in green are already in Space Engineers, but the red ones are missing.

I have included some rounded ones as well, as a "nice to have". I hope these can become "vanilla" blocks in the near future. (I can send these to you in 3D format if you wish!)

 

A couple mods have a few of the shapes. But more block shapes would be nice in vanilla.

 

Wouldn't help them much I'm afraid, as armor blocks in SE aren't just simply models. They have special setups to allow for the automatic culling of faces when they're placed next to each other. Making the actual models is the easy part. Other than that, at least a few more blocks would be nice, although I think you might have gone a bit overboard

Heck, I'd settle for just the half-block, I always miss that in my builds...

 

This attitude of "mods have this" is really daft. The base game should also have some content in it, and not rely constantly on mods! I like the way they are taking it right now though. They look at good, popular mods and add them into the base game itself. I like that a lot.

 

While I most certainly agree that this general attitude is annoying at best, more often than not statements like these are made to inform, not to discount the idea. Especially here, since the poster acknowledged the need for more block shapes in vanilla In this particular case though, there actually isn't a truly valid workaround, because there's no mod out there that creates proper armor blocks (afaik). They're just inefficient entity blocks.

As do I, because I don't like using mods. They've been doing that since the early days. The fighter cockpit was the first, I think? I can't remember if there were any additions before that...

 

Yes, the cockpit was indeed the first. Then the new armor shaped blocks was an attempt to recreate a block mod. Now the parachutes are going to be next.
I also heard long time back that Marek liked some weapon mods and they'd add those too, but that never seemed to happen yet.

 

+1 for this
i also have a hard Need on those blocks.
atm i m using 3 mods to get those blocks for any single build.
here an example:
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=851702792&searchtext=arcadia

try to build this without these blocks and also get this smooth shape

 

a mod having it shouldn't be the reason to not include it if it's "essential" (indeed, a few mods have made the crossover). being able to get it from the workshop is still better than buying it as a separate package though, so we've got that going for us so far which is nice.

 

I agree with the general premise of more options to add smoothness to design, I don't really agree with the amount.

What I'd rather see is a "smoothing" block. A smart block that takes a shape when initially placed aligned to all the edges of adjacent blocks. Then it retains that first shape as it's base shape for when it's repaired later with disregard to how the blocks around it have changed. A smoothing block should be enough to fill the annoying holes in design and add a general roundness to designs.

Then they need a window block to do the same so we can have some nice looking domes.

 

We... kind of already had that. Kind of.

 

God they were cancerous.
But idea is good!
If keen just manages to implement them right they would be neat.
But i doubt it is ery high in their to do list. There is so much other stuff to do

 

https://www.bilder-upload.eu/show.php?file=d1a108-1491123082.jpg
this one too plz

 

I think if they add a single block, like a half slab, they have to change ALL the other armor blocks. A few additional edges to cut/hollow the shape/polygon were it connects to other blocks, so you will not have those holes you see in the latest armor addition, no idea if they already fixed that yet... but that bug was there since the first day.

 

No, I disagree with the "auto molding" block. I'd rather see fully done blocks which I can understand, rather than a random mess. Thanks.

 

1... This should be in Suggestion section, not General.

2... No. Because that's just adding too many blocks for builders to deal with. It'll just hassle up the hotbars very easily. It need different building method that make it ease to design something. Adding more blocks isn't the answer.

3... I've already made suggestion about the armor blocks, that it should scale the block in all 3 directions, regardless of the shape. This way we don't have to add in so many different shapes for something that could have been solved by scaling. (See Scalable Shape Blocks: section here.)

 

You mean similar system to the wheel blocks?

 

Devil's Advocate: Scalable shape blocks would (a) increase the amount of data needed to sync a grid and (b) break the interblock polygon optimization. (There's a reason the ramp blocks were split, and it wasn't to give us options)

 

No.

A: No, it wouldn't add more, not when you're going to have a "block" in the grid anyway. The difference is how it was placed by the builder, not loaded from the data.
B: Maybe I should've explained better on my old thread but there's actually a way to retain the same polygon by sharing the same model, just shifted in height or depth of that edge in a section. It's not meant to be treated as one big block, after it's placed by builder, it's broken up into section for the grid. Builder would have a choice to cut out a section and change the shape.

 

A: Yes, it would add more since you have to transfer the scaling information as well. If not then ->
B: Creating dynamic blocks would add even more information that must be synchronized because now you don't even have predictive blocks and as such must transfer the entire geometry to all clients. Otherwise, you mean scaling (as with A) and then the polygon culling algorithm will have to be much more complicated, because it can't simply consider the direct neighbors of a grid cell but must check if there are any scaled blocks somewhere else which might cover this place.

(this isn't the first time such a suggestion has been discussed )
--- Automerge ---
@Nacon Don't just disagree buddy, tell me how my arguments are wrong, tell me how these issues can be overcome Like I said, I'm simply playing devil's advocate, by stating the issues I see about your suggestion, so you can counter them and end up with a better one.

 

Screw relying on mods. Why have a building game with basic blocks and not include these? As stated before, the mods that do attempt to include these blocks are inefficient entities at best. Please, Keen?!

 

those quarter pipe and slope pieces sweetly reminded me of tony hawks pro skater games.


heh heh heh...i can already imagine trying to do skater stuff in SE and the whole thing explodes.

 

Well, let's look at the idea of adding more armor block shapes and what it will do to the game playing experience.

I remember when the 2:1 sloped stuff came out. There was a renewed amount of vigor as people redesigned existing ships as well as came up with a lot more interesting designs than the 45 and 90 degree options in armor that we had. Ships stopped looking like Minecraft creations and started to actually look like... SPACESHIPS.

The more variations in the armor blocks, the better looking the submissions will be to the Workshop. The Workshop sells this game. It's the biggest piece of marketing Keen has. It's basically what "ordinary players of the game came up with and you could TOO." Granted, some people in the Workshop are amazingly talented... but you get the exact same toolset to use.

New armor shapes will have a lot of old users returning to at least the creative side of the game to try out new ideas and stretch the creative possibilities. These are all good things.

So the real question is not how much work this will be but how do you find the budget and the time TO make it happen? At the very least you'll be throwing some old dogs a new bone.

 

Surely basic shapes wrapped in an existing texture wouldn't take more than a day to do?

I know things are never easy... but making basic shapes in Blender?

 

I can't claim to know the process and how to effectively integrate them into the vanilla game in a way that can be optimized for performance (the difference between mods and vanilla). But I think the additional shapes are worthwhile since it is a BUILDING game.

 

Wow... I would like them all but if I could only choose 5 it would be these:

 

I was agreeing.

It's a simple case of chopping a cube into pieces and applying preexisting textures and code to them.

I just didn't wanna piss people off by using the 4 letter E word

 

Epic?

 

I more or less agree with Ravric's narrowed list - also I'm excited to see Ravric posting again! Your channel is literally the reason I bought SE, and I was super bummed to see that plagiarism drove you away.

 

It's not just the model. The blocks need collision volumes, and some of them are really weird. Concave shapes are particularly bad.

Exam?

Evil?