Reinforced Support Pillar discussions

[mblt]

I'm quite sure a lot of people have a lot to say about what this beta's bringing, very reasonable as there is a lot that warrants talking about, I'm sure many viewpoints are being considered, though I'd like to turn some attention to the pillars now that they've been added to the game.

I haven't exactly been able to scan the forum lately so I'll be misinformed, do correct me in these areas.

I know they were requested a lot previously with good reason as boulders were seen as a massive threat, one requiring tolerating once you open cave rifts, which is a permanent decision unless you manually disable them in world settings, which is metagaming, not to be confused with meta.

So now that we have this in the game, how do we feel about it now that we get to experience what was conceptualized?

 

I personally find them wonderful, though a bit out of expectations which is reasonable, they also could use quite a polishing.

I can imagine their use case decoratively to be astonishing once creativity flows, even for the surface! There's a lot of potential for them and I can't wait to see what people come up with. Even using them for the utility, it's what people wanted and I'm happy they have something to feel safer with.

I can only imagine all the possible skins pillars could get, rather exciting seeing all of the potentials of what a pillar skin could be.

 

The pillars don't seem to be without issue however, I've been able to spot a few issues and suggest what could be done about them.

 

They use wall grids for placement which was a suggestion of mine, but they don't exactly rotate as other walls do and this could cause difficulty in utilization.

A suggestion would be to give them a forward facing angle so they'd rotate to the diagonal angle like the other walls would. If this is too complicated, the alternative is removing them from the wall grid, as you can still utilize them without needing the grid. This would also enable people to be able to place pillars directly in the center of tiles. If that ends up mattering.

If they were to stay on the wall grid however and given forward facing angles, perhaps they could also count as a 3x3 of walls like some mega wall? Seeing it's a pretty huge structure that'll be wall grid dependent, it could count as one massive wall. Otherwise it's easy to cause funny texture issues seeing you can build walls directly next to pillars.

 

This doesn't exactly matter if you just want a pillar down regardless of if it looks nice or not, I also don't know if I'm doing something wrong, but something else that slightly bothered me was the pillar shape. It's very wide horizontally but narrow vertically, at least visually, this makes sense being a pillar and all, but it becomes difficult to make it look nice in all camera orientations.

Placing this more into the corner would only make other camera orientations unacceptable as it would instead be overhanging off the side of the floor.

I don't know if it's because of where the center of the pillar actually is as it's the pivot point, or if it's because the pillar is visually much larger than it really is. An idea is making the pillar less wider or changing how it rotates. Maybe the previous wall suggestion would automatically fix this as the pillar would fill the exact hitbox?

 

I'd like to hear what others think about it and/or my suggestions if they have something to say, I'm really enjoying the addition of pillars and I hope they get the required polish.

[Cassielu]

It should be noted that at the moment, using wall grid is actually the only way to allow players to build them alignment in non-modded games. Removing wall grid is not conducive to the base building, especially for console/switch players.

[mblt]

Having pillars be in the wall grid for that reason is actually very nice. Not that Geometric Placement isn't superior still, just that not everybody owns the mod or could get the mod for reasons.

The way I originally saw it was that pillars would use wall tiles but only because they'd be as thin as a wall. I imagined this would look ridiculous in practice but I liked the idea of lining the corners of walls up with pillars.

Not being able to place pillars directly in the middle of floor tiles could annoy some people, though I'm sure you'd be able to plan around this, especially if pillars become more wall-like. They'd compliment walls more in that manner. 

[NNOUS]

A solution of the problem in those Immagini for the rotation issues exist. Currently there is only 1 set of sprite for each stages and 1 set of each stage animations. To repair that would need make a new set of animation/sprites in the 90° angle. 

For now they look similar to fig tree with only 1 sprite. Hopefully Klei would add more qol rework like this.

[_zwb]

Would be better if they introduced this pillar before earthquake boulders, other than that it's alright

[Well-met]

My only question is why do boulders still avoid buildings after these?

[gamehun20]

3 minutes ago, Well-met said:

My only question is why do boulders still avoid buildings after these?

Probably haven't been reenabled yet

[_zwb]

4 minutes ago, Well-met said:

My only question is why do boulders still avoid buildings after these?

That would probably be reverted similarly to how the new items would be non prototype-able again soon

[Well-met]

2 hours ago, _zwb said:

That would probably be reverted similarly to how the new items would be non prototype-able again soon

weak acid rain and selective boulders not being reverted after several updates leads me to believe they never will be.

[Wonz]

8 hours ago, mblt said:

Reason why klei shouldn't trust us

[gamehun20]

1 hour ago, Well-met said:

weak acid rain and selective boulders not being reverted after several updates leads me to believe they never will be.

"Several" 2-3 

[lenship2]

it just needs skins now for the different pillars in the game (pls klei :c )

[mblt]

3 hours ago, lenship2 said:

it just needs skins now for the different pillars in the game (pls klei :c )

I imagine skins would be the case, I wouldn't exactly see why there's any reason to make a pillar of a different material if it'll function identically, other than being expensive decoration.

Unless new pillars of different materials had bonuses to them, which I wouldn't be able to think of any, walls have differences in HP at least.

[mblt]

Interesting discovery made much earlier that pillars also prevent Antlion's attacks, giving it more use outside of stopping regular debris from falling and defending you from rift earthquake boulders.

Spoiler

Remarkable if anything.

[Creatorofswamps]

18 hours ago, _zwb said:

That would probably be reverted similarly to how the new items would be non prototype-able again soon

I must have missed something. Where did you get this information?

[-Variant]

10 minutes ago, Creatorofswamps said:

I must have missed something. Where did you get this information?

Here!

And on the topic of Pillars, I like them, they don't seem too bad to upkeep currently and they're fun gameplay wise.

But man do I not like their art that much, it's alright but it's very dull! I had personally hoped for something more... makeshift! Cobbled together! Maybe skins would help.

[mblt]

Pillars could have lots of potential for skins, if different material pillars do get added, that'd be even more skin potential.

I never knew they required upkeep actually, perhaps the difference in material upgrades could be how many earthquakes they could endure before requiring upkeep...?

[Creatorofswamps]

1 hour ago, -Variant said:

Here!

Thank you

Spoiler

 

[NNOUS]

btw it can be remade similar with the animation asset of lunar siphonator

That move prospective with Q&E. Gonna say if all large pillar object like : archive pillar, fig tree trunk atrium piller that would have 45degree axle view AND 90 degree front view would be awesome for this case.