Building Block Sizes / Lag / Cities

[Kaeros 10]

It feels like Atlas wants to have a future where players build and inhabit cities on the new islands, which I think is awesome. I'm the architecture nerd, and love that aspect, and I'm excited to see that the game has some trends in that direction. That said, there's some real problems with it..mostly, the lag.

We built a city on top of a mountain, with players building houses inside the walls and with a harbor below. And honestly, on mid level machines it was a lag fest. It looked great and was super fun, but loading in was a nightmare.

If we had more options of building blocks, it would help alleviate a lot of these problems though. Larger foundation and wall pieces which cost appropriately increased amounts of resources, and had appropriately increased HP, would be a fantastic start! If instead of laying a 1 square foundation 16 times for a small 4x4 building, I could lay a single 4x4 foundation piece I have to believe it would drastically reduce the system resources required to function! Similarly, a 4 square tall wall built of individual walls is a HUGE number of individual pieces, but if we could build walls in reasonable sections, we could do so much more with so much less lag!

We also really need more options for gates and doors. The large gates are too tall, we don't have T-Rexes that we need to park inside them! The fact that there is no 2x2 door, roof door or ceiling door is SO limiting!

Please, a lot of these are not major changes and would be possible with just some tweaks of existing models to scale/adjust them or to weld multiple pieces that exist already into single pieces instead. Help us build the cities of Atlas without building the lag farms of Atlas at the same time!

[microphobe 72]

they need an ability to solidify sections of wall/floor into one piece after you have finished building. Even if they give a tool that allows you to paint sections so that they all join into one piece.

the only issue would be renovations which if they allowed it to be undone afterwards wouldn't be a problem.

[zubov56 8]

All of this is easily doable as it is already built in Unreal engine/tools.I figure this is simply the original teams work from 10 years ago and just left as is.I am not sure why they didn't simply give us the unreal built in tools,it would allow architecture beyond blocks.My guess is the original work was not on the Unreal Engine and this was just ported over but then yeah could easily add it in.

So then you could add in one giant wall  or build to suit an archway,whatever you want ,whatever size you want.The only issue though is texture sizes,you would have to stretch a texture to fit  all sizes of wall but again that is workable with the scale tool within unreal as well.Another plus would be private servers could easily port in new textures,basically you could mod edit anything without the need for their dev kit.

Another important need is to snap walls/floor to the large gates as well and imo we should have settings like private servers have allowing us to better fill in ugly gaps/holes due to "obstruction"error.Snapping docks also a nice mod we should have.

[Ravenx 5]

This should definitely be doable and we had the same issues with latency.   Please look into everything mentioned here.