Introduction
Some members of community believe that this upcoming update as a death to mapping, but that's not the case. The new update will actually empower mappers!
It's true, interiors and terrain will be gone. This is hardly the death of maps though, map makers will just have to learn how to make bricks. I'd like to introduce a new kind of brick that I'm nicknaming
set pieces for now. Set pieces are bricks - you can paint them, add events, lights, whatever. Unlike normal bricks though, they can come in a wide variety of shapes and sizes, they may or may not have studs on them, and you generally don't build stuff out of them but use them for decoration instead.
Set Pieces are Already Being Used!
Existing examples of
set pieces are things like roads, trees, and terrain blocks. With this style of mapping though, we'll see a lot more set pieces, like street signs and lights, props like trash cans or dumpsters, new kinds of trees, giant rocks, mountains, volcanoes, mushrooms, basically whatever you could use as a decoration for a map. Note that the purpose of these is not to replace building, but rather, allow people to quickly construct a map setting which people can then build in.
| | How Things Work Now
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| This terrain uses the bricks that we got with the terrain block update. This sort of terrain is useful for a number of reasons. It's a simple modular design. You don't need to know how to use any fancy editors. You can easily modify the terrain, and dig out things like caves. However; it's also limiting in some ways. You can't really do curves very well and skiing or driving on them just sucks. For these tasks we have traditionally resorted to terrain and interior based maps. The do a pretty decent job, but they are being removed from the next version of Blockland. We need to come up with a new solution.
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| | Introducing Set Pieces
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| This is where a new class of bricks come in. We'll call them "set pieces" to differentiate them from normal bricks. Set pieces can take on many arbitrary shapes, like curves and ramps. Suddenly skiing and driving just got a lot more fun. What was limited, box-like terrain is now totally awesome. So far I've just shown off some simple terrain bricks, but there's a lot more to set pieces then just terrain. For example, you could do buildings as well.
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| | Set Pieces are not Restricted to Terrain
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| These have huge advantages to traditional interior based buildings. You can stack them, rotate them, paint them, and basically make arbitrarily shaped buildings out of them. So instead of modeling a hundred different boxes and slapping different textures on them and then individually detailing them, you'll model a couple of modular skyscraper pieces and then stack, paint, and rotate them to easily create all the buildings you could possibly want.
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| | Set Pieces Work Together
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| Building set pieces integrate nicely with modular terrain. They come in the same standard sizes, so you'll never have to worry about them getting in the way of terrain vice versa.
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Development Plans
Please note that these aren't official or anything like that. I don't personally have plans to work on them at the moment since I don't really know how to make bricks. These entirely theoretical.
These are definitely plausible though, and people have already created far more complicated bricks than those that I am proposing.
Possible Implementation
Alright, that's the end of my discussion on modular set pieces. As I produce more concept art I'll publish it in this thread. Now I'd like to discuss a possible implementation of maps. I want to separate this from the previous section because it's more speculative. The modular set pieces are absolutely possible, and could even be made
right now, in this version of Blockland. This section is my personal suggestion on how maps could work in the future.
Editing MapsSet pieces are, functionally speaking, bricks. So you can build a map piece by piece if you want. However, individually placing all the components of a map can be slow, so modular set pieces should be able to be placed in a painting mode. Basically, you get an isometric view of the slate. There's a transparent grid on the ground, and you can use the mouse to move and drop bricks on the map. This will let you build terrain extremely quickly. I would also suggest that some kind of terrain generator be implemented so that people can just choose to play on a random map without having to mess around with building anything.
Playing on MapsThis is where set pieces differ from normal bricks. Anybody should be able to build on set pieces. If you hit one with a hammer it shouldn't give you the "<user> doesn't trust you" text. Rather, nothing should happen, just like if you hit the bedroom or some grass with a hammer. Map bricks shouldn't be modifiable by anyone except the host and those the host gives permission to. You should be able to clear all users bricks from the map without removing set pieces.
Saving MapsI'm not going to recommend any sort of file format, code, or anything like that since Badspot and Kompressor are infinitely more knowledgeable about the direction they want to take the game in and how it should work. However, it appears to me that if my suggestion as to how maps should work were to be implemented, there should be a way to save and load set pieces independantly of a build. This may needlessly complicate saving and loading of bricks, but it's just a though.
