Everyone beware!

[MetalX]

Before I go on I would like to say I love this game!(just in case you mistakenly think I am ripping on it here, which I am not.)

 

Seriously, be very wary.  When building your ship, should you decide to make a very elaborate ship, and you then exceed 30,000 blocks, as one does when making rounded objects, like tubular shaped engines and other fancy shamancey ship parts, the build mode gets VERY VERY VERY buggy.  So buggy, in fact, you may experience crashes that lock your entire computer, leaving you staring at nothing but black screen for what, I assure you, will feel like an eternity, as you don't know if you just killed your GPU/CPU or not.  I have even experienced 2 bluescreen errors due to this.  Some very scary stuff, especially when we are talking about a thousand dollars of computer hardware.

 

I cannot recommend building a ship with blocks in excess of 10,000 to 15,000 blocks.  Yeah, the bugginess begins at around 15,000 and gets progressively worse, the more you add.

 

Just a public service warning.

[Iris]

A very helpful warning, in that case I will try to stay away from round shapes and just resize the grid and snap values if I wish to build a big ship so that I can use large blocks instead of many tiny ones.

 

However, I feel that this is an issue that need to be fixed. If it's a hardware limitation, having the game detect these bugs and warn you to stop building so much would be nice, and if it's not then it really should be taken care of - nothing is going to stop people from building bigger and more complex! I suggest that you report the bug, using the logs and such if you still have them, since it might not happen for others? (I wouldn't know, I've never bulit something that large in terms of block amounts)

 

Oh and also, having rounded shapes actually programmed into the game would be nice. 1/4 circle (◕?) 'edge' blocks, corners; in short blocks like the currently avaiable ones, but for round shapes. I have no idea how the game does its magic internally (And I don't want to, my poor head might implode) but it doesn't seem that difficult and I'm sure it would be a loved addition by all the builder type of players. I've thought on many other things this game could use (although it's amazing already) but admittedly I've refrained from making suggestions because the game is still being developed actively and going through the forums the dev seems to have acknowledged. Chances are this is one of these things (let's face it, ''round blocks'' are not exactly a novel idea) that are waiting on the pile of 'things to include in the game' until the dev can implement them.

[Tchey]

You should change the title to be more specific ("More than 15000 blocks = crash" for example), and post this to Bug or Feedback.

 

It's fine to warn the players, it's even better to let the devs now about the issue so they can fix it.

[Blondersheel]

I've gone up to around 20,000 blocks without any issues.

 

That being said, that was when I mirrored a 10000 block ship out of curiosity. So far I've been able to build just about anything I want in less than ~7500 blocks. I haven't seen the need to go up to nearly 30k!

[Sable Phoenix]

I believe Koonschi has mentioned that rounded blocks are not planned as an addition, likely because they cannot be.  I assume it's an engine limitation.  Personally I'm fine with that... the build mode is already incredible and able to create (or fake) most things you want to create.  I would much rather see moving and rotating ship parts, but Koonschi has also mentioned that the engine won't support this either.

[MetalX]

I've gone up to around 20,000 blocks without any issues.

 

That being said, that was when I mirrored a 10000 block ship out of curiosity. So far I've been able to build just about anything I want in less than ~7500 blocks. I haven't seen the need to go up to nearly 30k!

 

Placing blocks exceeding 20,000 is not so much of an issue.  Things just get kinda slow.  The REAL problem comes when you try to delete blocks.  You go to delete 100 or so blocks on one side and the game just completely haywire.

 

And keep in mind, this is specific to build mode.  Playing with a ship you have built is no problem at all, IF you can build it.

 

What I ended up doing to circumvent this issue is I built the ship in pieces, specifically, the engine packs on the sides at the rear, a set of 3 engines that were long cylindrical and of varying widths up and down the length of the engines.  And there was one engine pack on each side of the ship.  These engines we constructed of .05X.05 blocks of varying lengths.  And they look totally awesome.  The problem is that each pack of engines takes about 9,000 blocks, and that is AFTER the merge tool is used.

 

So, I built them separate from the ship, in its own creative mode galaxy.  I then copied and pasted it to the build menu and then loaded my ship in its galaxy, opened the build menu, selected the material type and then pasted to the ship.

 

I originally tried to mirror it, but that crashed the game.  I figure that the game has a difficult time mirroring 9,000 blocks on a ship that already consisted of 10,000 blocks on it own.

 

Then a new problem.

 

I then tried to paint it.  Painting was slow, mirroring was not an option, it was even slower.  So I had to paint it block by block.  It was slow but it was working.  Then I tried to leave build mode.  And whoa, game crashed, but the game did not just crash, it took my computer with it.

 

I eventually had to abandon the project, sadly.  I ended up going with a much simpler design.  And unfortunately I am unable to maintain my interest in it.  I really wanted the original ship to work, it broke my heart to not be able to use it.

 

I wish I could share the picture with you, but I just can't bring myself to look upon it anymore.

[Triu]

I've been gone for a while, and was hoping this had been addressed already, a bit sad. Really enjoy building the massive ships, but when you end up needing to delete even 1 block after a certain point, it takes 10 mins of frozen screen or the game goes down.

[CptLewb]

Yep, I used to build detailed ships with 1000's and 1000's of blocks but when deleting anything you could literally go away and make a coffee whilst the (CPU I guess) is going crazy calculating what you've just asked it to do. I say CPU as I run a custom built PC with a 1080Ti GPU. There's no way Avorion would stress that thing! Surely??

[Iris]

What I wonder myself is why XML ship files. It's usually a bit slow and difficult to write parsers for.

I mean, the game seems pretty solid so I'm sure the dev must have a great reason for choosing XML over other kinds of file, but I can't help but wonder why.