Game Development: Surveyor's Delight

[pagsiu]

Nice update, glad to see you guys alive. New parallel world when?

[SpacePig]

1. Level the selected area by default to minimum remaining land.
2. Or manually set the leveling amount as a number.
That's all that's needed. Nobody will ever select irregular areas for leveling because it's completely dysfunctional — it provides no advantages in construction or defense and only causes extra problems.

Since eg. slope/hill construction is rather common, this is an abjectly false statement.

Only beginners will build a village on a slope because they don't know all the potential inconvenience and problems with expanding their base. For example, you can't build a house or chicken coop on a slope.

99% of villages will be located on completely flat ground, including all large villages and kingdoms.

Given this ratio, it makes sense to first satisfy the needs of the 99% of players by making construction as easy as possible for them, and then consider beginners who might choose to build near slopes or rivers, likely encountering leveling issues even at the palisade-building stage if they ever reach that point.

[Audiosmurf]

Where is the ERP server

[vatas]

99% of villages will be located on completely flat ground, including all large villages and kingdoms.

If a question of "do you want a village site that is completely flat, or a massive slope?" was asked in a vacuum, obviously you would choose the former.

However in practice (at least depending on how large of a village you want) this is hardly feasible and you may end up having to choose handful of different elevations for different areas. While currently there is little practical penalty for having the connecting slopes have the maximum angle possible, people may still prefer the aesthetics of having more proper "ramps."

Even if we disregard aesthetics, one construction method would be to build an expansion wall to the proper elevation first before "filling up" the space between it and the old wall. The new survey would presumably be an improvement when filling up such a "rampart."

Having tested the new survey a bit, I can see there should be stuff to help with "I just want to flatten this area." Something like quick options for...
1. have flat plane snap to lowest elevation point within the survey
2. have flat plane snap to largest flat area within the survey
3. have flat plane snap to highest elevation point within the survey
I'm not sure exactly how these should be implemented. Bluntest way would be to add a button for each directly into the survey window, alongside the four that it currently has. I doubt having subcategories or "sub-windows" is the ideal solution either. The old slider for elevation control would be neat, if nothing else for the fact that lot of people have accustomed to it.