Rebuilding the building system

The building system has had a fairly major rework.

In the very early versions of Evolve, building was based entirely around 0.5 metre voxels.

The system was simple. You had basic cubes, 45-degree pieces and a handful of other primitive shapes, but ultimately everything was still based around that same voxel grid.

It worked, but it also came with some fairly obvious limitations.

Buildings naturally looked very voxel-based, and although decoration could help, there was only so much variation you could achieve when every part of a structure had to fit into a 0.5 metre cube.

I've kept those primitive shapes in the game because I still think they have a place, but the building system itself has now expanded considerably.

There are currently around 100 different building pieces, including proper walls, roofs, structural pieces and a growing number of more specialised shapes.

One of the biggest changes is that building pieces are no longer completely tied to the voxel grid.

You can now place structures much more freely, which gives far more control over how buildings are laid out and means I'm no longer designing every piece around the limitations of a half-metre cube.

Walls are also now around 0.25 metres thick, which brings them much closer to what you would traditionally expect from a survival building system. It sounds like a relatively small change, but visually it makes a huge difference. Buildings feel much less chunky and there is far more usable space inside them.

I've also started adding stylised versions of some of the building pieces.

Long-term, the goal is to have plenty of variation so that two buildings made from the same basic materials don't necessarily have to look the same. The underlying system now makes adding those variations relatively straightforward, which was one of the main reasons for doing the rework in the first place.

Roof pieces have also become considerably more sophisticated. The original system only allowed fairly basic roof shapes, whereas the new system gives me much more flexibility with how roofs connect and how more complex structures can be created.

The snapping system has had a lot of work too.

Building pieces now use much more sophisticated magnetic snap points, so pieces naturally find the positions you would expect them to. The aim is to make putting a building together feel quick rather than fiddly, whether you're using keyboard and mouse or a controller.

This has effectively been a full rewrite of the building system, but I think it gives me a much better foundation going forward.

The important part is that the system is now extremely flexible. I can add new pieces, new styles and entirely new building sets without having to rethink how the core system works every time.

There's still plenty more I want to add, but the building system finally feels like something I can keep expanding rather than something I'm constantly working around.