An open letter to Boxelware: A (potential) Tiny Blocks Solution

(TLDR at the bottom of this mini-wall of text)

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DEAR BOXELWARE,

Firstly, HNY - I hope all of the Boxelware team had an amazing New Years break.

I'm writing regarding your recent, and understandable, decision to impose a lower limit for block sizes. Creating a resolution to performance and glitching issues is great idea and will benefit a lot of players, but unfortunately (as I know you're aware) the current solution will punish many of us that have already created highly detailed works - even if these creations are just for ourselves on our local machines.

I know I am not the only one that can say Avorion has become my go-to Zen garden. I have loved and supported every update so far - paid or otherwise - and embraced everything you had to offer until this recent change. Unfortunately, I feel these upcoming size limit changes will have a good portion of my ships, stations, turrets and shuttles forever unloadable in the near future.

I, like a lot of other players have gotten quite 'artsy' with some of my builds, and have created extremely detailed works that took many, many hours to create - because at the time, the game allowed hyper detail with teeny-tiny blocks. With block size limits soon to be imposed, many of us within your community of creators will have our builds effectively 'retroactively deleted'. I'm sure you understand that loosing our creations in the near future like this is more than disheartening, it's like being given a tool of creation, then having everything you built with that tool destroyed by the very person who gave you the tool.

Now, I know at the moment you can remove this limit by editing the server file, but lot of players won't know how to edit a server.ini, and it is unclear if this option is just a current band-aid fix or whether it will still work later down the track once you impose tougher limits for server stability. And, all of that goes without saying that even if we can mess with the .ini files for local games, there will now be no way of ever getting these detailed legacy builds onto newer 'block size limited' multiplayer servers without a lot of guess work while trying to find all the problem blocks.

A SOLUTION:

All that said, I would like to propose a solution that I hope wont be too development heavy.

Many of us would love an option to load in ANY ship/station/etc, regardless of block size, in a privately hosted creative mode with a simple UI option/warning (similar to your current warning for high block count builds) - and from there, a way to highlight the 'tiny blocks' so we can resolve old builds without having to guess which blocks are causing the problem. In concept, this 'tiny block' highlight would work in the same way as other highlight features already in the game: like the repair docks 'red missing blocks' preview, or build mode's 'view specific block type' option.

In this way, we could have all of the tiny troublesome blocks highlighted in red (or optionally, have all other blocks become transparent), and then be able to delete/edit the blocks that are preventing the build as a whole from being loaded on multiplayer servers - all without any guess work as to what blocks are causing the issue.

I know this may take a little time to develop, but I have seen this team create amazing updates before, and (within reason) this 'update' would lean on already developed code to highlight selected blocks or hide non-selected blocks.

Thanks for you time in reading this mini wall-of-text, my rant, and my proposed solution - and I look forward to hearing your reply in the comments below.

Cheers,
Tri.

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TLDR:

An option in creative mode that highlights any troublesome 'tiny blocks' so we can fix ships/stations/shuttles/etc for future use in multiplayer servers. This would help keep much more of our community happy with your recent 'minimum block size' changes by allowing us to keep our old 'legacy detailed' builds, and easily edit them for new 'block-size limited' servers if we so choose.