Symmetry plane for building

[AdinX]

If you play, have seen videos of, or are just familiar with the game Space Engineers, then you may be aware of a specific feature included in the process of building. More specifically, I'm referring to
Planes of symmetry

What this feature does on Space Engineers is it mirrors whatever you place, across the multi-colored frames. This cuts building time in half, by a third, or even 1/4 of the building time, depending on the number of planes used.

Building a giant space station, battleship or even a small fighter can take hours, if not days, to finish depending on the scale of the project. Here on Blockland, it can take even longer. So I'm left to wonder- why do we not have a similar system? Sure, we have the duplorcator and the duplicator, but they can't consistently mirror a build, and require you to actively place them.

One example I can see a very good use for symmetrical planes, would be mini empires builds-




I've dedicated an estimated 15 hours working that ship, and yet it's still not done. Now sure, it's entirely because I've been too lazy to finish, but what if, WHAT IF, I only had to build half of a ship, and the other half was built simultaneously?

What if you're building a bank? a house? TDM Map, car, block art, sculpture, etc? The uses for such a tool are literally endless.

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[LeetZero]

The issue would be that the game wouldn't know what to actually do in certain scenarios:
On a corner ramp, you'd need to only rotate once.
On a ramp whose slant is tangent to the mirror axis needs to be rotated twice, while the slant following the axis would not even need to be rotated.
For a wedge, you can rotate once.
For a 2x3 or 2x4 wedge brick, you'd need to change the brick itself.
For any asymmetrical special bricks, this simply wouldn't work, and they'd just need to stay without rotation.
The idea is great though, but whoever makes this needs to make separate rules for certain bricks. Which is doable I suppose.

[Zeblote]

The mirroring part is fairly easy, but you need to manually set how each non-cubic brick has to be handled.

That's not much of an issue without custom bricks, as you can just setup every brick once and then include the config in the addon.

If people should be able to mirror custom bricks correctly you'll also need to include some kind of interface so they can tell the script how each custom brick should be mirrored. I'm not too sure how you would handle this without it becoming a nightmare to use for the first time.

[AdinX]

Then the matter becomes non-advanced shape bricks. No ramps, no corners, no wedges. That still shaves down build time, even if it means the roof of a building or the angle of a ship isn't perfectly similar to the other side, you still get majority of the bricks.

[Pie Crust]

Or you can find someone bored enough to make this algorithm.

[phflack]

I'm thinking something like this and client sided, auto moving the brick to the correct spot and whatnot