Design For dev meeting: Next steps to make the game attractive for players that like building

[Florian]

One of the main rasons why minecraft got popular in the first place was that a lot of players posted the things they made in minecraft via youtube, twitter and other means.

For that reason I think it is important that terasology is attractive to players that are creative builders.

I think tersology is already quite close to be able to compete with minecraft in that area. Expecially since terasology can offer for example custom blocks, custom game models and nice graphics which vallila minecraft can not.

I would like to gather a list of poitns that make terasology more attractive that are creative builders

1. The block placement conditions need to be fixed in terasology. Currently you can not always place a block next to the block you are standing on (fixed see #1692).
   
2. A fall off edge protection during sneaking (with the current capsule like character collision model not doable)
   
3. A UI to pick blocks from (We have BlockPicker already but it does not work in multiplayer)
4. More blocks and placeable entities with custom models. e.g. roofs, placeable animated flags, placeable signs, windows, carpets, colored blocks etc.
   
5. A way to make areas as protected in multiplayer worlds, so that servers can actually show the work of others without them having to fear vandalism.
6. Elimination of spikes (short frezzings of the game)
7. Improved game performance (larger view distance !)
   
8. A way to give only selected players the ability to fly on a server
9. A user friendly way to define new blocks (e.g. mini ingame wizzard that allows the selection of a image and makes a usable module zip file out of it.
10. Customizeable human player models, so that they have something to show their stuff with in a video.

 

[Skaldarnar]

I agree with you on the general aim of making the/one gameplay more building-friendly. My first suggestion would be to add tags to your list in order to differentiate between bugs and missing content/features. Furthermore, let me quickly respond to a few of the points above:

3. You refer to the BlockPicker. As far as I know there are some issues with multiplayer (at least the last time I checked it ....).
4. We have some nice block shapes in StructuralResources, including slopes which can be used for roofs. I can re-visit colored blocks/glass, but I don't think rendering has changed that much since I tried it the last time. Regarding carpets and tapestries, I'ld like to see them as additional feature (like skinning a block) instead of an own block (but that's probably its own discussion).

 

[Immortius]

1. The block placement conditions need to be fixed in terasology. Currently you can not always place a block next to the block you are standing on.

There is code that prevents block placement that intersects with player collision. The player collision may be to wide, or code too stingy.

3. A UI to pick blocks from (We have something already: Status? Multiplayer tested? Permissions?)

We had a problem before with the UI causing every combination of block being generated, which exhausted the block id pool. Also we still had various byte limits in the code at the time, so this may work properly in multiplayer now? But yeah, we need a block picker that lets you choose type + shape separately, and only generates the block at the end rather than all blocks upfront.