500 Piece Blueprint limit

[tyczj]

During de-lady-signer's stream, ed wanted her to save the castle she made to the blueprint's but she could not because there is apparently a 500 piece limit for the blueprints. I think that is a little disappointing since any big detailed building is going to have a lot of pieces so we are going to find smaller buildings or multiple blurprints for 1 building unfortunately.

Hopefully this limit can be raised/removed or we can hear about why there is a limit on the number of pieces.

 

[MKelley]

there is another thread from the developers saying they are increasing the number of parts to your building. from Bo see below

Originally Posted by Joshaloo (Source) Bit worried about when De-Lady-signer tried to save her castle as a blueprint, it said there were too many objects :/


The limit is 500 pieces, which means that complex buildings wont really be shareable

kinda worrying

Bo's responce Hiya, don't be worried; the "limit" is still not set; we are constantly testing how far we can take it and how we can optimise everything. This applies to any aspect in the game, especially being in Alpha 3

. You'll have a true number with the final release of Planet Coaster.

 

[Dante80]

Hopefully this limit can be raised/removed or we can hear about why there is a limit on the number of pieces.

There is exactly 0 chance that the limit would be removed in whole, for obvious reasons that have to do with the features' functionality.
As expected, the actual limits for the feature will be balanced around a number of different factors (file-size, feasibility, functionality, performance impedance etc etc).

To give a quick example. This game is designed so that it can be played by all players that

A. Have paid for the game.
B. Have a computer with the minimum requirements (and have set the graphic/simulation settings accordingly for their computers).

Now, imagine a player that possesses a monster PC rig making a gorgeous cathedral building, complete with interiors that actually make it a food plaza. The Cathedral has a wonderful, absolutely stunning roof, made from about 1200 wooden signposts stacked in every possible direction.

He certainly wants to share the building with his friends, and other Planet Coaster players. So he makes a blueprint out of it, puts an annotation in the description saying that it is a heavy asset - resource wise - and publishes it.

There will be many, many players with middling laptops that will download it without reading or paying true attention to that annotation. Especially since the playerbase in a theme park CMS game has a lot of children too. Their game will lag, they will remove the building, go to the players blueprint page in the workshop and downvote it - and him - massively. Or blame performance of the game to Frontier, open bug reports, trash the game in the Steam forums etc etc.

If you are thinking that something like this cannot happen, I assure you it will. Whatever the end limit might be. So, there are a lot of possible scenarios where an actual limit is prudent to have. And that limit will be determined by the developers, not us. We will have to play around it, according to the game rules then, not ask for the rules to change for our own purposes.

 

[Bitter Jeweler]

I watched that happen and was a little shocked at the limit. Her building wasn't that complex, really.
On the flip side, if people share "building kits" that might be kinda nice as well. Take all the pieces of her castle and make your own!
The hardest part is already done! [yesnod]


Judging by her 1200 piece castle, what would you think an acceptable limit should be?
I'd say 2500 would be adequate for most peoples creations. Silvaret is an anomaly. [haha]

 

[Dante80]

Silvarret or Kukamonda are indeed anomalies..[wacky]

I think that Frontier can reach something like 1000-1500 pieces without problems. Judging from what I build, this number seems pretty good for segregating different building/prop-set projects and uploading them. I've made some with far, far more objects, but their removal and addition to a park has a rather visible effect on performance for me.

 

[Crowdpleaser]

I think normal players wouldn't really reach the 500 Pieces limit. But we will see what the final limit is going to be.

 

[ManiaMuse]

+1 to what Dante80 said, gamers are a funny breed and will complain about anything and everything before blaming the developers

I'm not sure what the limit will be but 2000-2500 would be reasonable for most creations I would say. The most potentially framerate hitting time I'm guessing is when you are moving the blueprint before placing it.

There's always the option of just sharing things in several segments and letting users download and place the blueprint pieces individually. You could use some temporary reference blocks to help line things up.

 

[Stream]

You could always put a warning about it being system-heavy on blueprints that contains over 1,000 pieces or something? It would be kind of sad to miss out on some of these crazy buildings a few people are building just because of other people's limited systems.

 

[Crowdpleaser]

You could always put a warning about it being system-heavy on blueprints that contains over 1,000 pieces or something? It would be kind of sad to miss out on some of these crazy buildings a few people are building just because of other people's limited systems.

Or just SHOW the Number of Pieces in the Blueprint selection screen or whatever.

 

[Stream]

Or just SHOW the Number of Pieces in the Blueprint selection screen or whatever.

Well of course, but if the argument is that for casual players you don't want things to be too heavy on PC systems, then a warning may be good too. "This building contains over 1,000 pieces and may slow down your game" - something like that.

 

[Caid]

A thing to keep in mind here is that a creator can do things to reduce the total piece count. De-lady-signers castle once completed, for example, had many pieces that were no longer visable and could be removed to reduce the total piece count. No where near enough to reach that 500 piece limit though. The point being content creators will need to be cognizant of what they can do to reduce piece counts. Getting to those pieces will be a pain without out ways to hide other buildings that make up the overall final object. A culling tool that would remove pieces that can not be seen would be ideal.

 

[Shief]

[up] for blueprint showing # of pieces.

It'd also be good to have a general "weight" indicator e.g. under 500 pieces is "light", 501-1000 is "moderate", 1000+ could be "heavy" with a warning icon. Or only show the heavy & icon on 1000+.

 

[BrittMcGoo]

Just make smaller blueprints whereas buildings have separate building sections and BINGO problem solved

 

[tyczj]

There is exactly 0 chance that the limit would be removed in whole, for obvious reasons that have to do with the features' functionality.
As expected, the actual limits for the feature will be balanced around a number of different factors (file-size, feasibility, functionality, performance impedance etc etc).

To give a quick example. This game is designed so that it can be played by all players that

A. Have paid for the game.
B. Have a computer with the minimum requirements (and have set the graphic/simulation settings accordingly for their computers).

Now, imagine a player that possesses a monster PC rig making a gorgeous cathedral building, complete with interiors that actually make it a food plaza. The Cathedral has a wonderful, absolutely stunning roof, made from about 1200 wooden signposts stacked in every possible direction.

He certainly wants to share the building with his friends, and other Planet Coaster players. So he makes a blueprint out of it, puts an annotation in the description saying that it is a heavy asset - resource wise - and publishes it.

There will be many, many players with middling laptops that will download it without reading or paying true attention to that annotation. Especially since the playerbase in a theme park CMS game has a lot of children too. Their game will lag, they will remove the building, go to the players blueprint page in the workshop and downvote it - and him - massively. Or blame performance of the game to Frontier, open bug reports, trash the game in the Steam forums etc etc.

If you are thinking that something like this cannot happen, I assure you it will. Whatever the end limit might be. So, there are a lot of possible scenarios where an actual limit is prudent to have. And that limit will be determined by the developers, not us. We will have to play around it, according to the game rules then, not ask for the rules to change for our own purposes.

having the limit removed would be nice but certainly isn't necessary 2000 would be more than enough I think but a piece count on the blueprint would let the downloading use know what impact it might have on their park if they were to use it

 

[Dante80]

A piece count would be indeed prudent to have. Right now, the video shown lists the ingame cost for the blueprint when you save it, and the item filesize when you upload it. Having the ability to automatically show ingame cost and piece count on the uploaded Workshop items would be cool.

 

[whitedoom]

Well the problem with big buildings is very likely solvable, but because of the piece building limit and the reason that could be behind it like some people mentioned here in this thread worries me about something else and that is an eventual limit on park size you can download. I really hope that will not be the case lolz.

 

[MaximusGXL]

I just hope they increase it or it will ruin blueprints.

 

[Minnion]

A thing to keep in mind here is that a creator can do things to reduce the total piece count. De-lady-signers castle once completed, for example, had many pieces that were no longer visable and could be removed to reduce the total piece count. No where near enough to reach that 500 piece limit though. The point being content creators will need to be cognizant of what they can do to reduce piece counts. Getting to those pieces will be a pain without out ways to hide other buildings that make up the overall final object. A culling tool that would remove pieces that can not be seen would be ideal.

I've suggested in the past that we do need a Hide/reveal tool specifically for this very scenario.(Selecting objects that are buried behind other objects.)

 

[BernyMoon]

I hope they change it.

 

[Xuxotron]

If the limitation is due to a better performance should directly notify the download, not the number of pieces, but the number of polygons of the set, which is really affecting the performance .But for buildings that have no intention to modify , perhaps automatically calculate the polygons that are inside it perhaps complicated .... but it could enable manually delete the polygons once finalized the blueprint? Or even harder ..... ¿merge all objects and turn them into a single mesh? Conserving the price of the objects used ....