Reworking the Building System

The next thing I started working on was the building system.

Truth be told, I wasn’t planning to touch this at this stage either, but the more I played with what I had, the more basic it started to feel.

I’d also been playing quite a lot of Valheim, and looking at how flexible their building system is made me a little bit jealous of what they had achieved. So I decided it was probably time to push mine further.

The core building blocks in Evolve are 0.5 metre voxels, which I really like because they give a nice level of detail. The downside is that placing everything one half metre block at a time can become quite cumbersome very quickly.

So one of the first things I changed was the way blocks can actually be placed. You can now drag out rows of blocks, and I’ve also added patterns through a new radial building menu.

For example, instead of placing every voxel individually, you can select a wall pattern made up of around 20 voxels and place a much larger section in one go. It keeps the underlying voxel system, but makes actually building something much faster.

I’ve also introduced what I’m calling pieces.

Pieces are things like posts, beams, stairs and smaller structural details. These sit outside of the normal voxel grid and can be positioned with much finer precision.

That means you can move a beam or post around within the space of a single voxel rather than everything being locked to half metre increments. It opens up a lot more possibilities for making buildings actually look interesting instead of everything feeling like it has been made from the same blocks.

I’ve also spent quite a bit of time improving alignment.

Previously, you had to look quite precisely at where you wanted something to go, and once I added pieces that became even more awkward. I now have a magnetic snapping system where nearby connection points are detected and pieces naturally snap into the position you probably intended.

It’s still something I’ll keep improving over time, but even at this stage it feels much nicer to use.

The radial menu has made quite a big difference as well. There are multiple pages for different building options, patterns and pieces, and I’ve tried to make sure it feels just as natural on a controller as it does with mouse and keyboard.

There’s still plenty I want to add to building, but it already feels much less like placing individual voxels and much more like an actual building system.