What textures are you referring to; what can't we use? I mean, sure, we can't paint our blocks with rifle textures, but that wouldn't exactly look great..
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.
My apologies then. The way I interpreted your argument was "this is so obvious that there's no reason not to do it, so they must be stupid." If I misinterpreted a subtlety in your message then I am sorry.
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.
faatal has commented on this in the past. In short, limiting paints is due to memory usage.
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
As far as lighting goes, ask any veteran POI designer and they'll tell you how much lighting impacts things and how they have to work hard to design their lighting to avoid problems. Changing colors wouldn't have any effect, I'm sure... but intensity can. You mention only lowering intensity, but keep in mind that if you allow lowering it, you also need to allow increasing it. Not all lighting that we can craft is at full intensity. I think only one is (the bare lightbulb), though I haven't looked into it and am just basing that on observation while playing the game. Now, to be clear, I'm not saying that lighting will affect everyone. I've never personally had issue with lighting, even when I go crazy with lighting. However, it is definitely a known problem for some people and TFP isn't likely to want to add something that would potentially cause a portion of their players to have problems. It's one thing for it to be a mod, where people can choose whether or not to use it. It's something else to have it built in. As I said, I think they should be able to just make it an option so that people who want to use it can and those who have problems can avoid it, but I don't really expect them to do so. And I agree that having the options for lighting would be great. I'm just pointing out the potential problems associated with it and why it's unlikely they'd add the ability to adjust lights.
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.
I really doubt lighting options would draw in additional Minecraft players. That would be nice to have, but it's hardly something that is all that exciting or interesting. If someone isn't interested in the game, adding lighting won't change that. More building options might, but lighting is something that is more like a bonus than something that would actually change someone's mind about the game.
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.
