I love a great many things that Planet Zoo offers for its customization but one of the things I find myself continually banging my head against a wall about are two major things:
Needing bigger rock formations, and needing a way to create bigger terrain edits that don't take me 3+ hours to build up a large hill/small mountain.
Bigger Rock Formations
This one I feel is more important than the terrain editing for a lot of builds because of how the number of objects on-screen slows down performance over time (especially on lower-end or mid-tier computers), so being able to create some larger builds with less objects would be a huge benefit.
Using some examples from my own zoo, some of the things I've built using rock formations to get the effect I'm going for easily takes up 100+ rocks per scene to make it look like anything half-decent, and even then you still run into the problem that there is inevitably a lot of areas that look very obviously repetative using the same prop. These scenes would take a lot less time to make, a smaller hit to performance, and overall look better if I just had some bigger rock formations to use!
If nothing else, I feel that ice blocks/rocks need this treatment more than any other rock type, although I'd like to see more options in general for large rock formations to do up larger cliffs or mountains within my zoos. It should be a generally easy addition to the game as well since almost all rock formations for different biomes, minus the Aquatic pack (although I feel it should get some big pieces too) are just color reskins.
Ideally there should be a variety of pieces, with some more jagged and varied, like a mountain or cliff, and others being more large superflat formations (to make walls, floors, ceilings, ice sheets, etc). We can further customize them with the smaller rocks we already have in-game if we feel they don't quite fit what we need.
Ideally we should have:
If needed, they could get their own category separate from standard "rocks" in the Nature tab, a "Cliffs" or "Mountains" tab perhaps.
Improved Terrain Building
This one is slightly less of a big deal to me than the rock formations, but there again, when I want to build something BIG out of the landscape (like a tall mountain zoo), even with a max 20 sized brush at 100% strength takes painful amounts of time to build up the landscape to how I want it.
Terraforming in this game already takes arduous amounts of time to get everything just right to how you want it, with a lot of finessing and finding just the right brush balance that doesn't make unwanted changes. We don't necessarily need a bigger brush (I know doing so might really negatively affect performance), but a more reliable way to build up landspace on a larger scale.
Either a faster brush (maybe an optional "terrain boost" checkbox separate from the regular slider that goes beyond 100%? Some sort of multiplier?) could be an option, or some sort of "land-fill" tool similar to how the game calculates water (needing 4 closed off sides to fill), or simply larger Terrain Stamp options than we have now (or again, an optional multiplier option).
Because as you can see now, the max size for the terrain stamp tool is nowhere near big enough to be efficient for that sort of build without it taking a loooong time to make.
If performance is an issue with such a tool, I think having a separate multiplier checkbox or separate slider would be good, with a hover-over text that warns users using the option may affect performance on lower-end machines, so those who can benefit from using such a tool can have the option, and people with PCs that would croak at any performance hit are given clear warning before using it ("use at your own risk").
But again, I know this one would be harder to implement and balance good performance, so its less of a priority of mine than the rock formation objects, which should theoretically give positive performance improvements.
Needing bigger rock formations, and needing a way to create bigger terrain edits that don't take me 3+ hours to build up a large hill/small mountain.
Bigger Rock Formations
This one I feel is more important than the terrain editing for a lot of builds because of how the number of objects on-screen slows down performance over time (especially on lower-end or mid-tier computers), so being able to create some larger builds with less objects would be a huge benefit.
Using some examples from my own zoo, some of the things I've built using rock formations to get the effect I'm going for easily takes up 100+ rocks per scene to make it look like anything half-decent, and even then you still run into the problem that there is inevitably a lot of areas that look very obviously repetative using the same prop. These scenes would take a lot less time to make, a smaller hit to performance, and overall look better if I just had some bigger rock formations to use!
If nothing else, I feel that ice blocks/rocks need this treatment more than any other rock type, although I'd like to see more options in general for large rock formations to do up larger cliffs or mountains within my zoos. It should be a generally easy addition to the game as well since almost all rock formations for different biomes, minus the Aquatic pack (although I feel it should get some big pieces too) are just color reskins.
Ideally there should be a variety of pieces, with some more jagged and varied, like a mountain or cliff, and others being more large superflat formations (to make walls, floors, ceilings, ice sheets, etc). We can further customize them with the smaller rocks we already have in-game if we feel they don't quite fit what we need.
Ideally we should have:
- "Large" pieces that are a few times bigger than the largest $30 rocks, and gargantuan/mountainous pieces that are a few times bigger than those
- Large, bulky, jagged rock formations, good for making better cliff details or small mountains
- Long and wide superflat pieces, similar to the 4x4 Cladding rock pieces but on a much wider and longer scale. Ice would especially benefit from this addition for builds involving aquatic arctic designs and ice flows
- Long, narrow superflat pieces similar to the Cladding rocks for creating things like land-bridges, tunnel and cave ceilings/walls/floors, plateau tops, etc
- Long, narrow, bulky rock pieces similar to "[__] Rock 07" or "[_] Rock 17" that occurs in most rock types except Aquatic
- A few huge, hulking rock formations similar to the $20 and $30 rock formations but on a much bigger scale
- In general I still think ice would benefit the most out of this to do glacier formations and such but again, ANY bigger rock formations would be a huge help
If needed, they could get their own category separate from standard "rocks" in the Nature tab, a "Cliffs" or "Mountains" tab perhaps.
Improved Terrain Building
This one is slightly less of a big deal to me than the rock formations, but there again, when I want to build something BIG out of the landscape (like a tall mountain zoo), even with a max 20 sized brush at 100% strength takes painful amounts of time to build up the landscape to how I want it.
Terraforming in this game already takes arduous amounts of time to get everything just right to how you want it, with a lot of finessing and finding just the right brush balance that doesn't make unwanted changes. We don't necessarily need a bigger brush (I know doing so might really negatively affect performance), but a more reliable way to build up landspace on a larger scale.
Either a faster brush (maybe an optional "terrain boost" checkbox separate from the regular slider that goes beyond 100%? Some sort of multiplier?) could be an option, or some sort of "land-fill" tool similar to how the game calculates water (needing 4 closed off sides to fill), or simply larger Terrain Stamp options than we have now (or again, an optional multiplier option).
Because as you can see now, the max size for the terrain stamp tool is nowhere near big enough to be efficient for that sort of build without it taking a loooong time to make.
If performance is an issue with such a tool, I think having a separate multiplier checkbox or separate slider would be good, with a hover-over text that warns users using the option may affect performance on lower-end machines, so those who can benefit from using such a tool can have the option, and people with PCs that would croak at any performance hit are given clear warning before using it ("use at your own risk").
But again, I know this one would be harder to implement and balance good performance, so its less of a priority of mine than the rock formation objects, which should theoretically give positive performance improvements.
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