I am having a blast with Landmark. Â I love making things. Â The problem I am having is that I can’t seem to make things look good. Â I’m hard on myself, I know. Â I realize I am probably better than 50% or more of the players, but when I look at some of the work being tweeted and shown on streams by the devs I feel like I am finger painting with my thumbs in a class full of Rembrandts, Monets, and van Goghs.
Maybe these brilliant builders are all architects and designers, or missed their calling in life to be one. Â I’ve tried watching HGTV and the DIY channels for inspiration but I can only take so much. I know it will take practice and time to get better.
Something bothering me, though, is the gap between those who can manipulate the game engine better than others. Â Micro voxels, zero volume voxels, E=MC2 gigavoxels, etc., are all these new fangled ways of glitching out the game or exploiting one tool to yield unexpected results from another to create something that interacts with the world in a really, really neat way. Â I feel like there’s this secret menu people can order from that I don’t know about. Â While you are all getting your animal style fries I am stuck playing with the normal cheeseburger.
For example, in yesterday’s stream there was a trick to make inlays. Â You had to cut out your basic shape, duplicate it, stack it 5 deep, fill in the original, smooth tool the duplicate, transpose the filled in original into the middle of the duplicate to get the voxels to snap to each other, then biopsy the final product.
Why can’t there just be an inlay tool?  Why can’t there be a microvoxel tool?  I hope the Landmark devs understand that while these are really awesome features (once called flukes) that some people are able to  take advantage of, there are those of us with zero talent who want to play with them too.  I have tried on numerous occasions to use microvoxels and I just can’t figure it out.  I don’t know what I’m doing wrong.  I’m starting to feel like I’m on the outside looking in at a bunch of people with geometry degrees.
This is Alpha. Â My plea here may already be a top priority. Â If it’s not, all I ask is that someone consider making these really neat tricks more accessible.
I agree with you, its one of the reasons I dont play it more is I can’t figure out a lot of these tricks and stuff and its very discouraging. Then again maybe I just am not creative, but I have pictures of these awesome things in my head and just can’t make it a reality.
Yes! I am exactly the same way! I can see the awesome image in my mind but I can not even begin to build it.
Some of us are artists, others are gamers.
I have zero art skills, I cant even do stick figures. if I can build a house that looks semi decent so can you 😛
Start with a base/outline/template and then tweak it, add, modify, work on it and mould all the time towards what you want, don’t start directly with the end product but work your way there.
As for microvoxels, I am a quick learner but microvoxels are simple once you get the basics (they connect, they auto fill, redoing the corners will undo the autofill) and most the basic ideas you can pick up by watching tutorials and then modifying for your own use
Start by making a simple fence so you can learn how they connect to each other. then try making a tile (3×3 square, put a different colour micro voxel in the middle, re-do the 3×3 edge to fix the melding)
look up lots of things, copy them, then do your own
Hopefully they will at least make the mathematical transformations user-friendly, like button pressing alterations.
A long time ago I used to have a job for the Forest Service in Colorado where I had to work in a -20’C freezer taking 3 D microscopic photos of snow core surface sublimation. They had a digital image processing program, most of the transformation buttons I didn’t understand when I started. Basically I had to edge and depth enhance photos to get an estimation of ice core densities to predict water runoff in the warmer months.
What I found was that it was great fun to just start by randomly pressing buttons and watching the results, and then later figure out how to string together combinations for greatest effect.
If writing transformation algorithms is not required, have at it, press buttons in different sequences and see what freaky things occur! Take the time to educate yourself on the program (aka game) before judging yourself too harshly. 😉
I would kill for a minimap!