S.N.O.T. elements and more

[Ithirahad (Mvp333)]

As a LEGO game made entirely of bricks, when I first entered the game I was expecting a large selection of bricks, even (though I realized later why it's not the case) the full LDD set. I wasn't too disappointed when this proved not to be - this is Early Access, after all - but I'm curious: would it be practical for the game to support the 'bracket'-like pieces, known to the building community as SNOT (Studs Not On Top) elements? And if so, are there plans to implement them? Because if there were, it would vastly expand the game's construction possibilities.

And, on a slightly wilder sidenote, what about custom vehicles, whether brick-built or modular? Or... custom functions, like LU's behaviors?

[MBRedboy31]

As far as I can tell, I haven't noticed any of the devs mentioning any of these things, but I guess we could just search for them or something.

As I see it, the problem with implementing SNOT in this game is how the voxel system works. LEGO bricks aren't perfectly square, so introducing sideways bricks makes for very complicated collision while building, makes it hard to program the occlusion culling since sideways bricks won't always completely cover other bricks, ect.

Truly brick-built vehicles also seem difficult to implement due to the voxel system, as the placed bricks are always considered to be part of the terrain. They would have to make a separate editor or otherwise overhaul the system in order to make it possible to place bricks on an entity such as a premade chassis placed in the world. Behaviors similar to those in LU suffer a similar problem due to the lack of custom entities, although some other sort of logic system could be made if custom entities aren't ever added.

[Vyvyvn]

I was pondering over this, And other issues of in-virtual-world things we can't do that we can in real life, Sideways bricks and all and figured a way you could technically pull it off.

It would take a separate modeller but imagine being able to assemble the object from bricks in a CAD soft of some sort that came with this. No bounding boxes to worry about as you assemble your model.. When the model was finished, You would then do a sort of compile on it where it would look at the assembled object, S.N.O.T. or no, And build a mesh of sorts, With the bounding box calculated and perhaps a cost in studs associated with spawning it to fit in with the inworld system.

You could then add the object to your list. It'd be a little more work-around-ish than just trying to implement S.N.O.T. inworld, But it WOULD allow people to have S.N.O.T. based builds in their lego worlds.

[Aloan]

Originally posted by Vyvyn:

I was pondering over this, And other issues of in-virtual-world things we can't do that we can in real life, Sideways bricks and all and figured a way you could technically pull it off.

It would take a separate modeller but imagine being able to assemble the object from bricks in a CAD soft of some sort that came with this. No bounding boxes to worry about as you assemble your model.. When the model was finished, You would then do a sort of compile on it where it would look at the assembled object, S.N.O.T. or no, And build a mesh of sorts, With the bounding box calculated and perhaps a cost in studs associated with spawning it to fit in with the inworld system.

You could then add the object to your list. It'd be a little more work-around-ish than just trying to implement S.N.O.T. inworld, But it WOULD allow people to have S.N.O.T. based builds in their lego worlds.

I guess it is simpler development wise if those snot builds were then transformed into props (at least for the time being) I believe doors and windows for example (although not Snot and which are being developed by the dev team) when they come, will be props that will live alongside brick builds (the house) as they should be (for the sake of their function) animated and interactive!

[qMeisterp]

For me S.N.O.T building ingame is a must!
Seeing all the props and dont be able to build something like that is very annoying, the same with only static building... two-thirds of my LEGO sets are things that move. So for the real LEGO experience we need such things.