Riamus
Well-known member
There is a difference between textures that are baked into the object and textures that are available to use on any paintable object. When a texture is baked into the object, it uses no more memory than the object itself. When you make the texture available for use elsewhere, you now need to use memory for it. As I mentioned, they have explained that there is a limit for what fits into their paintable color atlas. In order to add more than what fits in that, they need to use additional memory by adding a second color atlas, which they aren't willing to do. This is direct from the devs. As I said during that discussion, I think there would be a way to add more textures without doubling the memory needed by adding another will also atlas. But that is what the devs have said, so unless they decide to change things, we are limited to what fits into that color atlas. Because they removed many textures, we now have room for them to add more without needing to add another color atlas, so that is a good thing. And as I mentioned earlier, I prefer actual paints that are usable for decorating a base rather than wasting space with paints that have very limited use (like the beer cooler I mentioned).Any texture in the game that isn't part of the available selection. Look at any object in the game, it needs a texture, not every texture is available. Take the gas barrels for example, the red ones, they are simple cylindrical shapes with a texture. That texture isn't available to you as a paint, but you can craft a flaming barrel as an object that has that texture. There are annoyances too, like in 1.0 they removed the beverage cooler you could craft, they created a new multi shape item called kitchen appliances but they don't include the cooler. The only way to create a cooler now is to create a box, and paint it with that texture, yet that texture isn't available to you despite beverage coolers being all over the place.
Even just a proper range of colours, we don't have that. You want a pure white? Can't have it, you can have an adobe one, yet lots of surfaces are pure white, a colour you can see but can't paint.
You definitely misinterpreted my comment, and what is slightly worrying is that you chose the definition where I was actively insulting the development team. If you are unsure, just ask, don't drop to an assumption. Especially when that assumption paints me in a such bad light.
However, apology accepted.
As a dev, and a gamer, I am very keen not to throw pointless and emotive ad-hominem into a discussion, they achieve nothing.
It's a design decision that has placed restrictions. Without full visibility of the codebase and without a better understanding of how Unity's memory management I can only speak in nebulous terms, but it does seem little short sighted to add in so few textures considering the nature of the game. I am guessing there was just a trade off at a some point and the lower priority was the paint textures. I would like to think there will be wiggle room found to expand that selection. Memory may be a concern but from an (again) a a nebulous viewpoint, if you are hitting the limits of available memory these days then that's probably a hint that you need to look at memory management.
In terms of "missing textures", I gave an example in the reply to @zztong
If I read between the lines you are saying we can't change the intensity because it would cause frame issues, yet we both know the light is dynamic, and light is constantly being calculated. It's all rolled into the same pipeline. If you render a room all blocks will need to have their light calculated, whether there is low light, normal light or intense light. At the extreme levels, sure, you could run into an issue where light is casting over 30 blocks or so, but it would be easy enough to put an upper limit on that.
A lot of this will be down to whether TFP have used Unity lighting or built their own bespoke code to handle it, you'd hope that it's the former although when the game was first released Unity was in a very different state. However if it is the in built routines then they should not be having issues rendering the sort of light levels we see in 7Days.
If you are arguing that the player should be stopped from being creative because the engine has limits, then that's not a stance I agree with.
Even if we take the intensity of the light out the equation, why no coloured lights? There is no argument that frame loss happens when a blue light is being shown but not when an orange one is. The simple ability to change light colour would make a dramatic difference to the "vibe" of people's builds.
How much creative do you do? I think you'll find many who lean into it, despite playing in a survival (ie: non-creative) mode. Currently we have 3 main light sources, candles, torches, electrical lights. The latter has (imo) really poor aesthetics, the only way I ever use electrical lights is when they are embedded into the structure to take some of that "edge" off. My bases at present either look far too bright or far too dull, every single time.
That said, the reason I mention it is less to do with "better lights, more creative types", and more the idea that there seems to be a fairly large community that TFP have not tapped into. Have you ever seen a 7Days creative stream? I've not, I'm sure there are some, but nowhere near the numbers that stream survival. The core element of creative is almost identical between the games, yet 7Days has so much more detail that it should bring in those frustrated with the way minecraft 1x1 blocks looks so poor (unless you literally slow the thing down to a crawl with shaders/texture packs). If you want to look at how bad decisions made during development impact future expansion then it's the lighting/textures in Minecraft. So much so they literally had to rebuild it from scratch (creating the flawed Bedrock edition) in order to address a multitude of issues.
For me, it's the same as pushing to game to console, it's generating a new revenue stream. There is, imo, an untapped market that TFP could be going for, yet never seem to engage with. Don't get me wrong, they clearly engage with developers who create PoIs and that is creative, per se, but I am talking about a larger and more consistent ecosystem for those types of players/creators to exist in.
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Jinkies, that was quite the post....
Overall, I think the baseline is "more textures and more flexible lighting would improve the look of the game". I doubt people will disagree with that. The question is whether it can be delivered in the current game framework with no, negligible, or minimal loss of performance, and if so then that can only be a positive.
Now, I do want them to make all decorations available for crafting, which would include that beer cooler. But they don't want to, so unless enough people are requesting it, it isn't likely to happen.
As far as being creative... That is about all I do these days. And you quoted what I was saying about lighting and Minecraft. I started that just making it possible to change light colors or intensity is unlikely to get more Minecraft players to play this game. And I stand by that. It is, of course, my opinion as there is no way to know for sure without adding that to the game. But I am confident that is the case. You already have a lot of lighting options if you are using creative mode and although changing colors or intensity would be great, it is a minor thing. Far more useful to people who want to be creative are block shapes and paints. But lighting by itself isn't going to attract more players... at least, not many.
In any case, you are welcome to all them to add lighting options and paints. I have never said that either is a bad thing. I would like those myself. I just pointed out what they have said.
