Don't Starve Together

Don't Starve Together

Geometric Placement
Sworddragon 20 Dec, 2020 @ 3:59am
[Feature Request] Geometric placement of items
While Geometric Placement allows us geometric placement of structures it does not allow geometric placement of items - while this would not even be an unusual case.

- Personally for me when I start building bases on worlds which go usually at least several hundred of days either alone or with friends I accumulate a "trash pile" of all sorts of items. This becomes usually hard to navigate and a slight issue in general until the base advances with around 70-100 chests including drawn signs to sort all stuff away. But with the mod Advanced Controls and its geometric item placement feature I can more easily structure this trash pile - mainly also because I can drop full stacks on top of each other. But I can't tell if I'm basically the only player playing this way or if other players would benefit from geometric item placement here too - but there are also some more general cases below.
- Bundles of too many items can be easily stacked on the same spot. Usually I see other players doing this with too many food or items like lightbulbs. They place signs, draw on them the specific items and then stack bundles on top of each other.
- The Celestial Orb acts as a Crafting Station but is an item and thus can't be placed in a sane manner perfectly on a unit to make it even to other structures.
- The above applies also to bait. Putting Bunny Puff on an exact specific unit is also not possible in a sane manner and leaves always a flaw in ones mind that the base is not perfectly finished.


There might be even more cases but I think it is clear that something is just missing here. Currently I use Advanced Control as an alternative but unfortunately it only allows dropping items every 2 units (where walls would be placed) - while I would like to be able to drop items every single unit (basically matching with Geometric Placement's grid). Previously I used Sanity Station Builder to do the job but since it was optimized on dropping Abigail's Flower it used 0.75 units for dropping items - besides that this mod is now deprecated and might not work reliable anymore in future versions of Don't Starve Together. None of me or my friends are aware of mods that allow geometric item dropping with 1.0 units - maybe such a mod does simply not exist. But even if such a mod would exist it would be only a workaround as it makes in my opinion more sense to have both features (geometric item placement of structures and items) bundled together in a single mod - where they suit very well together.



If this idea isn't already immediately rejected here, here are some thoughts about the implementation details:

- The both mods above (Advanced Controls and Sanity Station Builder) have no grid for the item placement, they simply just drop to the nearest of their defined units. Such a simplified implementation alone (or in a first pass) would already do the job.
- Having then a grid on it would be a very huge improvement - but I would expect this to be a significant performance issue if we have the grid now on every item. However, the grid here might work more efficient than on structures since we can simply drop items even on spots where structures can be temporary blocked and thus might not need to check for those. But we still might want to check for other cases like walls - or we could simply ignore those. Also the grid probably doesn't need to be as big as it is for structures. Having 1 tile at default would be probably enough for easy item placement.
- It should be ensured that items (like multiple full stacks) can be dropped on top of each other without problem.
- An option to make this behavior a default or not and a configurable button to en-/disable this behavior might be needed to fit different player needs.
- Personally with Advanced Controls I keep early on 2 piles of every item - 1 pile for completed stacks (e.g. 5 x 40 Nightmare Fuel) and 1 pile that is unfinished (e.g. 1 x 29 Nightmare Fuel). Normally I wanted to placed all those same items into 1 pile but unfortunately the option to combine stacks does not appear anymore on the mouse cursor if too many stacks are on the same spot and thus resulting effectively in many unfinished stacks which would just favor lags. If it would be possible to give the combining of items always priority over dropping them this would make things much easier.
Last edited by Sworddragon; 22 Dec, 2020 @ 6:56am
< >
Showing 1-1 of 1 comments
rezecib  [developer] 26 Dec, 2020 @ 10:09am 
I attempted to implement this while working on the Tilling grid but ran into some challenges. I've had https://github.com/rezecib/Geometric-Placement/issues/26 open for a while on it but it hasn't been easy to add.

The technical issue at hand is that the game has native support for showing a "placer" on right-click actions (to support pitchforks), but doesn't show them for left-click actions. The code around this is not easy to mod so I have to be pretty careful writing it or it will break easily as the game gets updated.
< >
Showing 1-1 of 1 comments
Per page: 1530 50