A quick note; This idea is based off most of the others recently posted in this forum to do with various block combination's and blueprints. I'm merely expanding on these ideas, and in no way do I have any intention of plagiarising the ideas of others.

If you're familiar with most RTS games in which you select a builder, order it to build something and it does so accordingly, then a little scaffold graphic is shown along with some progress bar to show until the building is complete, then this will be a lot easier for you to understand.Don't make the assumption that this idea just involves staring at a massive scaffold holding a button until a fort magically appears.

It seems that everyone wants building to be more interesting and easier (increasing the difficulty of building will only slow the pace of the game, so I'm still under the impression we want a faster game) so I thought that I could take the standard style of building in our beloved RTS games and mix it in with SourceForts.

The idea at it's most basic form is; A player selects a list of different premade scaffolds from a list (Bunker, Straight wall with ramp, whatever you can think of) with specific details about the amount of blocks required and which blocks exactly. In this sort of blueprint, players can spawn or grab blocks and 'snap' them into the correct position instantly. Once all the required blocks are snapped in accordingly, the scaffold will dissapear and the 'building' will revert to it's standard block form.
Scaffolds health could vary depending on size, but they would be significantly lower than normal blocks, making them very vulnerable to enemy attack. If a scaffold is destroyed when half of it is built, any blocks within that block would simply unfreeze so they have to be used in consideration.

Scaffolds themselves take a good time to build, so the player would have to consider whether it's best to use a scaffold or simply build their structure by scratch.

Pros:

• Quick, easy building of large structures.
• Consistency - No Human Errors involved in building.
• Keeps the game at a fast pace, with the ability to build relatively complicated forts.

Cons:

• Very weak - Easily destroyed by concentrated fire.
• If destroyed half way through construction, all blocks unfreeze instantly.

Feel free to discuss, troll, Azlan.

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While I'd like to see the idea come true for ease of building, have fun coding that! XD

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"I hope Draken and #'s will get picked up by communities that actually deserve them."

Hey, that's not my problem.

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To put it bluntly, I don't like it. :<

It makes it easier to build perfect forts (something we'd like to avoid as much as possible) when players aren't in combat (something we'd like to avoid as much as possible)

I think it'd be ok to build perfect but simple structures on the front lines of combat, since players would be under too much fire to have time to worry about it themselves. If you make a system that allows them to "fill in the blocks" they can rest assured that what they've built will work once they go to use it, rather than something that may end up being no more useful than a pile of blocks.

I don't, however, think it would be good for actual "base building." The whole point of 2.0 was to eliminate "perfect" base turtling, so if we implement a system that allows them to do exactly that, while simultaneously encouraging them to stay out of combat to do it (the whole thing falls apart if it gets shot), we'd be going completely against the core changes of the game.

This is a problem that will be very complex to work out, but it's imperative that we figure out a solution before we implement a system that leads to the same problems we have with 19x.

The way they're to do that in haven is by making it impossible for players to just sit around and spend seventy minutes building uninterrupted and by making it easier to get over or destroy walls, not making building the walls themselves more difficult.

Anything that makes building more intuitive should be welcomed.

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Having tried building in haven, it's absolutely no more difficult to build in than 19x. The only thing that changes is that it takes a bit longer, but even with the added time, its very fluid.

The real issue is that the "standard" system and the scaffold system overlap far too much. If the game doesn't have the exact scaffold you need, then you're stuck building by hand anyway. As such, I think the standard "building by hand" ought to be fast/easy enough to cover building things like walls etc.

TBH, I'm not particularly fond of my blueprint concept either, as it really only has a couple uses. I think we'd be better of creating a better standard building system than supplementing a mediocre one with a prebuilts system.

Sorry, Dra, but I don't like it.

I'm not a fan of pre-builts (wether they are truely pre-built or not) because for one thing they're not universal, and for another they're not unique.
The whole turtle argument above holds true, also.

I'm not even completly hapy with the idea of a block combo for a straight-forward bunker, but thereyago.

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sounds like it could be in the next version of mudkipz!

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In before someone comes in and posts a completely unrelated comment for the sole purpose of degrading the value of the thread.

Oh wait, too late.

on the rts note, why not speed up block creation/freezing/unfreezing if there are >1 "builder" working on it, or if say there are two within a certain radius of each other building.

not sure if thats been suggested before

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