Developer Diaries – Episode 9

Summary
Greetings, Engineers! The 9th episode in our series of developer diaries has been released. Today we introduce you to Greg, our programmer who worked on the revised building for Medieval Engineers.
Revised building is the unification of building between Medieval Engineers and Space Engineers. This is to allow the use of planets in Medieval Engineers. We needed to do this because the old building system was locked to a fixed grid. This grid was no longer useful because of the curvature of the planet, meaning that buildings needed to rotate to align with the planet’s surface. The additional benefit is that it enables players to build freely, aligning castles with the natural features of the world.

Planetary building
There are now 3 ways of building, they are similar to the old system but have some exceptions.
– The first is the possibility to aim and place a block in the same way as in old Dynamic Mode, but now the player doesn’t have to switch to it. If a large block is touching a voxel (ex. ground), it will create a local coordinate system aligning with the placed block.
– Secondly, when you are targeting the ground close enough to your position, it will start snapping your block to the closest building’s coordinate system.
– Finally, the 3rd way of building is simply snapping to existing grids, this is basically not changed.
Small grids can be placed with any transformation in dynamic mode without switching between modes.

What does this mean for performance?
You will no longer need to create dynamic grids just to orient your buildings slightly differently. By making them static, the performance will be significantly less impacted.

Modding & Scenarios
Modders will be able to define how people can place their blocks, they will be able to define if a block can only be placed in the ground, only be placed in air (dynamic mode), only be placed on top of another block, or any combination there-of.
Scenario and world designers can now create their scenarios more easily. You can copy-paste your new blueprints in any orientation into the ground, this will allow you to create more interesting looking environments.