Adding buildings to existing buildings?

[romejeme]

I'm not sure if I'm missing something here but I can't seem to figure this out if it already exists. I know you can select a grid when adding paths but what about when adding saved buildings? A problem I've been having is snapping a ride, coaster, or ticket booth onto an existing building. What would I do if i wanted to create a ticket booth building before adding the ticket booth?

Either there is some weird trick I'm not seeing here or it may arrive in a future update but I can't find a plain solution to this and I wanted to point this out as a suggestion. It would be very helpful to have this feature. I know you can do tons of things in this game already which is why I feel like I'm not seeing something and making this thread sound like it belongs under the support topic.

Anyways, any sort of input is greatly appreciated and if this feature doesn't exist just yet, I suggest that it could be added in the future.

 

[ScorpNation]

Hello, If I am getting the right you want to be able to place or build a ticket booth before the ride ticket booth. You can all you need to do is well make sure you got a doorway otherwise you will have the AI peeps walk though the building wall etc. Make a queue going towards that area making sure it's lined up then place the booth where it's needed to be pending on your design also making sure it is connecting to the main path and the queue its self. If your building the booth from main building etc roller coaster building if your wanting the main building and and booth building one whole building you will need to place the booth building where you want the path to go then get your ideas from there so on and so on making sure the one whole building.

 

[Parsec]

all you need to do is well make sure you got a doorway otherwise you will have the AI peeps walk though the building wall etc. Make a queue going towards that area making sure it's lined up then place the booth where it's needed to be...

Either there is some weird trick I'm not seeing here or it may arrive in a future update but I can't find a plain solution to this and I wanted to point this out as a suggestion. It would be very helpful to have this feature.

I'm in the very same situation.
Like you say, there either must be something obvious that I'm missing... or really there's no way to connect rides and buildings other than the "Start building on station grid"... which really just creates a "new building" that starts from the station's grid... but doesn't really "links" anything.

Fun fact: at the moment the option exists for other things. If you're handling a single item... and you're hovering a building... a tip appears to ask you if you want to "Add to [buildingname]" ... but as far as I know, that happens with single objects only, not with entire buildings. It sounds pretty obvious to extend this to a whole building. Select a building, hover on a ride, tip appears: "Add [buildingname] to [RideName]"

Fun fact 2: The other way around, placing rides in buildings, is also already available for shops. When you select a building and enter edit mode... you can click on the "shops and facilities" tab to select a shop to be placed in it... the building doesn't lose selection, you simply "link" the shop to the building... and you can even link more than one shop to the building.
why isn't this available for coasters too? [shocked]

 

[breezerHOG1]

A bit confusing but, I think what you guys are asking for are two different things

#1) Currently, players can select a station platform to create a grid and start building from scratch, but when placing a blueprint it can be very tricky lining it up with a station platform. A snap-to feature might be nice when placing a new blueprint to an existing building.

#2) Not sure if I'm understanding the thread correctly here, but if you have an existing building in your park, and you select a new blueprint to place next to it, you can "connect" the 2 buildings by removing part of one side and then making another building/hallways between them. I think that is what Scorpnation was saying

#3) Linking shops to buildings is still not enough. Sometimes players have a large building with a tiny shop buried inside of a ton of scenery, but if you use the blueprint and just want to switch the shop stall to something different, it can be very tricky to remove the original shop. Yes we should be able to link or "snap" buildings to station also, but we need to have a "swap-shop" feature to change a shop within a building much easier and without having to delete anything.

I hope that makes sense [cool]

 

[PC_OCD]

I would like a way for rollercoasters and buildings to snap to other buildings as well. This seems obvious to me. I'm not sure why it was left out of the game.

However, I've found a way to sort of make it work. Its a little tedious but it does work..

Using the path, select grid option you can build a path on the original buildings grid that extends out into the area you want to place the new addition. Using the path that is extended its possible to line up your buildings pretty closely, if not exactly. Unfortunately, they are still two different buildings but with using the multi-select tool you can move the buildings as one unit. This may not help the ticket booth idea because the path will become a nuisance and continually try to snap to any existing path but for adding buildings to other buildings it works pretty well.

 

[Parsec]

Unfortunately, they are still two different buildings but with using the multi-select tool you can move the buildings as one unit.

But you'd still have the problem of placing the buildings together... how do we allign one to the other?

Listen to me tale of woe, matey.

Imagine you have made a building. For no reason. At some point you start to build a shape and you come up with something nice. "Oh! That's lovely!" you think "I'd love to make it a station for a coaster!" so you save it as a blueprint and you tell yourself you're going to try make a coaster out of it, next thing tomorrow .
The day after...
You select the blueprint, enter edit mode... and then go to the coaster ride to place a ride in it, connected to the building, like it happens with shops. But... you select the ride tab and the selection goes away? You're out of edit mode and you're simply placing a station somewhere, freely, with no grid constrains and no connection with your building. Why? Shops don't behave like that... why coasters do?

What do you do at this point? Well, you place your coaster station somewhere and you try the other way round, you take the building and...? You meaninglessly shake it at the station. Nothing. She's not impressed. You press the station's "Start Building on station grid"... so you have now created a new building (with nothing in it, yet)... if you place something it will obviously allign perfectly to the station. Good. You can see the building you deployed nearby... you slowly move the cursor toward the building, very slowly, out of hope the game doesn't realize you're actually going to click on it. But nothing... as soon as you click on your building you exit the edit mode of the station's building... and enter edit mode of your deployed blueprint.
"Oh, but of course!" maybe you need to select "Start building on station grid" before you deploy the blueprint... so it will deploy the blueprint inside the newly created building (or in some way linked to its grid... which means linked to the station's grid) You think. But no. As soon as you select the "My Blueprints" tab you're thrown out of edit mode...

What's left? Nothing... you deploy the building, build a station and then simply try to very slowly and very painfully allign the two things... and it might work only if you do not require a super-precise allignement. Those aren't the most precise controls ever, all depending on perspective and distance... perhaps you find that the building doesn't want to allign to your station at all. Right before you start thinking suicide would be a faster and much less painful solution, you remember there is that nice "Reset rotation" button inside of the "advanced move" menu... it seems to align all pieces to some base set of absolute coordinates. Good idea. The station does not have an "advanced movement" button, tho.
After a long time spent kicking the keyboard around the room you find a way to cheat this. You first tell the game you want to "move the station" as usual... you do that by pressing "M"... then all of a sudden you click "X" to go to the advanced movement. It works! Now you can click the "reset rotation". Good. The station rotates... or doesn't rotate, if it was already alligned to these absolute coords.
Blueprints are easier, they do have the Advanced Movement button... and when they enter this mode you can use the "Reset Rotation" button... except.. the "proper orientation" for a large group of objects (such as a complex building worth saving as blueprint) is apparently recalculated... so they might allign to those coords by rotating in unforeseen ways. Pressing the "reset rotation" might not work at all to allign them to something else, even tho both have undergone the "reset-rotation" routine.

What do you do at that point? Probably you come here on the forums to see if there is a solution you've missed... or to suggest the devs to work on some feature to avoid all this

 

[Lasairfion]

It's all a bit wonky. And if you actually want to add one gridded building to another one you made before.. well nope.

I've come to the conclusion that for whatever reason, Frontier aren't going to change their mind on joining buildings together any more. So, since they've removed the option.. I suggested in another thread that the least they could do would be to add scenery pieces that match the building pieces. Feel free to comment on it:

https://forums.planetcoaster.com/sh...t-like-the-building-ones)?p=161091#post161091

 

[breezerHOG1]

https://forums.planetcoaster.com/sh...t-like-the-building-ones)?p=161091#post161091

this is a great point, theres no reason why this cant be done or why the ability to rotate walls was removed from alpha 2

 

[PC_OCD]

But you'd still have the problem of placing the buildings together... how do we allign one to the other?

The path you place using the grid selection tool which is now extending out from the original building becomes your alignment tool. If you make the path square in path options you will have 90 degree angles that can be used to align walls from one building to the next. Its certainly not perfect but it is a way to get things to align. I've successfully done this to add a rollercoaster to a building and I'm pretty sure you could add the building to a rollercoaster this way also.

You mention shapes in your post... If you create a non determined shape with scenery you can work around it too. Its more difficult but, when building with scenery that is not bound by grids, you should always put an item that follows grid rules as a placeholder first, such as a small post or a roof tile. By adding the grid placeholder, the shape that you create becomes a "building" and all pieces will be locked together into a grid via the grid complacent piece and thus it can be aligned and moved like any other building that follows a grid. Once you've aligned that "scenery" building you can then delete the grid complacent piece or keep it there just in case you want to move that scenery "building" again, because once you remove it.. the scenery items are not locked into a building anymore and have to be selected individually.

If you'd like I can post some pictures to demonstrate how I've used square paths to align my buildings.

This is something I have done in the past as a solution to this alignment issue and that is why I posted it here. So, I'm hoping although it isn't a fix it may help you workaround aligning buildings together.

 

[breezerHOG1]

If you'd like I can post some pictures to demonstrate how I've used square paths to align my buildings.

it would still be much nicer and simpler if we could just combine 2 separate buildings into one grid

 

[Parsec]

for whatever reason, Frontier aren't going to change their mind on joining buildings together any more. So, since they've removed the option..

Wait... what? There actually was an option to take a building and allign it on the grid of another building?
And they removed that option?
[shocked]
.... but... why?

 

[breezerHOG1]

Wait... what? There actually was an option to take a building and allign it on the grid of another building?
And they removed that option?
[shocked]
.... but... why?

i think he was talking about the ability to rotate walls to any angle, which was a "glitch" in alpha that was removed

 

[PC_OCD]

it would still be much nicer and simpler if we could just combine 2 separate buildings into one grid

no doubt.[up]

 

[Parsec]

Its certainly not perfect but it is a way to get things to align.

Just hitting "Reset rotation" is another simple way to have things to align in a way that it's "certainly not perfect" (due to the re-calculation of the orientation when the object is complex)

I've successfully done this to add a rollercoaster to a building and I'm pretty sure you could add the building to a rollercoaster this way also.

Rotating freehand? Of course. But honestly, that's still not the level of precision we're discussing here :\
Unless I'm missing something... you're simply suggesting to use a straight path as a visual reference to freehand rotate an object until it's "more or less" rotated the way you wanted it.... if this is what you mean... well, there is plenty of parallel lines between a coaster station and a building... and I can use these to "approximately adjust" the rotation.

If you create a non determined shape with scenery you can work around it too. Its more difficult but, when building with scenery that is not bound by grids, you should always put an item that follows grid rules as a placeholder

You're talking about a blueprint made of a couple of scenery objects thrown together I really wouldn't bother allignement too much in such case Don't know why the word "shape" impressed you. Of course, when I'm talking about "making a coaster station out of it" I'm certainly not talking about a flower pot or a bush near a rock I'm talking about, in my case, a starship of considerable size... which, as you might guess at this point, has plenty of roof, walls, columns, etc... making it a a legit building in itself

the problem is to ask a gridded building to allign along the grid of another building.

 

[Parsec]

i think he was talking about the ability to rotate walls to any angle, which was a "glitch" in alpha that was removed

"joining buildings together" ?
I do not really care much about free-angled walls to be honest. I understand this is the grid and works in this way, I'd use more pieces with more shapes, (diagonal, inner curves, etc) that'd be quite useful, but I'm fine with how tings are... grid-wise.
I just don't understand why there can't be an "allign to this building's grid" button [blah]
Even having different building, not "linked", not melted into one single building, I'd still be ok with that... as long as I can ask a building to allign along the same grid of another...

Edit: But really, the point is just that the system is already available for shops. You have a blueprint, you select that building, go to edit mode, open the shop tab (and it doesn't close edit mode) select a shop, drop it in the building, close edit mode... and now they're connected. Why can't there be the same for coasters?

 

[PC_OCD]

Building Alignment

From creaper's quote I'm assuming you would like to see some screen shots so, I did this very quickly but I hope it helps and I apologize if I used too many pictures.

This is very rudimentary but it applies for pretty much any buildings that you are going to align.

1st, I have two buildings that you can see aren't aligned:

2nd. I moved the hex building away for now.. and I place a square option path that is "align to grid" of the building. For the base grid alignment I like to use paths rather than wall extensions. Either can be used but paths are much easier to delete and when dealing with height I find aligning a doorway or platform to a path works nicely but you may like to just use walls.

3rd. moving the hex building into alignment using the path. I create wall extensions to the building to accentuate the straight line needed for alignment. Using the advanced edit rotate tool I align the hexagon wall to the path.

4th. Same concept as above. Adding an extending wall and using advanced edit to perfectly meld the walls together horizontally:

vertically:

You can see here how I've aligned perfectly using the extension wall. this OFC is not as easy with roofs but roofs are easily moved out of the way and put back afterwards.

I now have two seperate buildings that even though separated by space, they are on the same building grid:

Rollercoaster stations or any other ride can be aligned to a building using this same method.

 

[breezerHOG1]

thats a lot of work to get 2 separate buildings lined up!

 

[PC_OCD]

thats a lot of work to get 2 separate buildings lined up!

yep but it works. Don't know any other way to do it.

 

[Parsec]

That's what I was talking about when I said "freehand positioning". Thanks for the pictures but... as you might (?) have understood from my reply, it was already more than clear. To allign two buildings I can take plenty of reference within the walls of the two buildings, already. I don't even really need to involve the path in this process... which is, as you admit, inaccurate. Might be Ok for this small casual buildings... but not really usefull with huge structures where a single fraction of a grade of difference at the base it becomes a 2 meters gap after 100 meters... I'm talking about having the same grid. If I move an item along one of its axis ... it must slide perfectly parallel. I don't want to move a light on a wall, here... and find it floating magically in the air at the other end of the wall because of "a small difference".

 

[jamesviago]

i think he was talking about the ability to rotate walls to any angle, which was a "glitch" in alpha that was removed

why on earth you'd remove a "feature" that the community not only loves, we've been screaming for it since alpha 1, is beyond me.

call it a bug and stop us doing it. why? why?

good grief they are struggling to keep up with feature requests as it is, hardly awesome to delete something that already works.