Construction alignment woes

[stridecolossus]

I'm having a bit of a hard time with alignment of building pieces during construction. In the attached pic hopefully you can see a viewing gallery that I'm creating. Obviously any parts that are grid-based (i.e. with the hash symbol) match up nicely with each other, such as the wood walls and roof segments. The problem I'm having is that are any pieces that are not on the grid appear to be on a slightly different alignment from the rest of the building - I have a post selected in the image which was attached using position snap / align-to-surface on one of the walls, but it's not aligned to that wall (or any others, I've tried them all). If I use advanced move the axes are on a very slight angle, which makes building very painful as you can imagine!

I've tried switching between local and global axes in the advanced move tool - they are the same. I've double-checked settings and there is nothing obviously incorrect there. Why would this be happening?

Couple of observations:

1. This is happening for every building in this zoo implying I've somehow screwed up alignment globally across the whole zoo? However it's only occurring for this particular zoo (franchise mode btw if that matters) and I don't have this problem in any of the others or when starting a new zoo.

2. If you look at the paths in the pic you can see that the 'planks' are also at a weird angle, again implying that I'm doing something wrong, but I don't know what!

What am I doing wrong?

 

[LN]

Non-gridded items need some extra love

I'm always having alignment issues.

 

[stridecolossus]

Non-gridded items need some extra love

I'm always having alignment issues.

Yeah of course non-grid pieces are inherently trickier to deal with but this is something more than that, and as I said it's only happening in this one zoo. I'll take a couple more screenshots to illustrate the problem and raise a ticket on the devs. But to be honest I think in the short term I'm going to have to delete this zoo because building anything is taking ten times longer than normal!

 

[Harai]

Honestly I dont see the problem you speak of, only the path one. But paths are not exactly construction pieces and as such its better if you dont use them (asethetically) as part of any building except when connecting facilities, what you can do is hide the concrete part of the paths using the floor pieces. And the texture on the paths are on the "global grid", that is if you cover your entire zoo with this path they will all face the same direction, they dont follow the orientation they were built on, so probably this wooden path youre laying is just a little something off the global grid of your zoo

 

[stridecolossus]

Honestly I dont see the problem you speak of, only the path one. But paths are not exactly construction pieces and as such its better if you dont use them (asethetically) as part of any building except when connecting facilities, what you can do is hide the concrete part of the paths using the floor pieces. And the texture on the paths are on the "global grid", that is if you cover your entire zoo with this path they will all face the same direction, they dont follow the orientation they were built on, so probably this wooden path youre laying is just a little something off the global grid of your zoo

I just dived back in the game to get some screenshots so I could report the issue (if indeed it is a bug) and - you've guessed it - it worked fine, any off-grid pieces are correctly aligned to the local grid of the building I'm editing as they should be. At this point I was starting to doubt my own sanity when it started to happen again! Thinking the problem had gone away after saving I carried on detailing some buildings and off-grid pieces started to be off alignment no matter how I snapped them to a building. Exited the game and reloaded and it's correctly working again! I'm guessing one building is somehow screwed up - I'll try and work out which one...

Just to re-iterate: the problem I am experiencing is that an off-grid piece (like a plank or pole) should be aligned exactly to the wall it's snapped to, you should then be able to rotate it to where you want it (usually with angle snap on), CTRL-X to duplicate, etc. The problem I was having is that after snapping the axes of that pole in the screenshot are not aligned to the grid of the building, it's slightly off (by a couple of degrees after measuring), so to make it work I have to rotate it freehand a couple of degrees to get it on the grid which is very time-consuming. Note that it's fine vertically, it's the horizontal alignment that is slightly out.

Think you're correct about the path alignment 'issue', that does appear to be tied to the global grid of the zoo, so it's nothing to do with the problems I was having.

 

[Harai]

I think I got it now, if you duplicate and change the item you're working with he is rotated off the building grid, is that it? Like the faces of a squared column dont match the face of a wall?
If thats correct it have everything to do with the global grid. See, when you spawn one item inside the zoo it will follow the orientation of the global grid, not the building grid, so if you're working in a building whose orientation is diagonal to that of the global grid the squared column pieces (or any piece that is not round) will not face correctly with your building walls. I know its something you were already trying to do, it seems, but when building with this level of detail its always better to follow the zoo grid and only when you're finished you rotate the building in place. I dont know if its intended or not so I would not count it as a bug, most content creators just seem to accept that this is how it works and work around it
Maybe your other buildings are better aligned with the global grid and just this one is a little off?

 

[Dr4gon]

Before you load your zoo, switch these things off in your settings. They say it helps, but I wouldn't know, because switching them off was the first thing I did when I got this tip. I am not a good builder.

 

[stridecolossus]

I think I got it now, if you duplicate and change the item you're working with he is rotated off the building grid, is that it? Like the faces of a squared column dont match the face of a wall?
If thats correct it have everything to do with the global grid. See, when you spawn one item inside the zoo it will follow the orientation of the global grid, not the building grid, so if you're working in a building whose orientation is diagonal to that of the global grid the squared column pieces (or any piece that is not round) will not face correctly with your building walls. I know its something you were already trying to do, it seems, but when building with this level of detail its always better to follow the zoo grid and only when you're finished you rotate the building in place. I dont know if its intended or not so I would not count it as a bug, most content creators just seem to accept that this is how it works and work around it
Maybe your other buildings are better aligned with the global grid and just this one is a little off?

Yes I think you have it, guess it's just one of those things you have to deal with and work around rather than a bug as such. It's especially noticeable when you snap a piece onto a flat surface (floor or flat roof), the horizontal axes of that new piece are not flush with that flat surface but are aligned to the whole zoo as you say.

Building on the global zoo grid and then moving the building is a good tip, cheers. At least I didn't delete the whole zoo and rage quit!