I’ve been thinking about adding “proper” roofs since…. perhaps before the Steam release. It wasn’t possible to add in a practical manner before Zun developed the automatic-adaptation-system. When he started working on it this year, I made the first mockup, just to see what it would look like, roughly.


It was very simple: just one “side roof”. The screenshot already shows more complicated blocks: side roofs with a “front”. But on simple houses, you can get quite far with just side roofs!

But what if the width of your house is not an even number? Then this happens:


So we needed an extra shape: the “middle roof”. And of course, the middle roof also needs a variant with a “front”, one with a “back”, and one with both the front and the back in one block. Problem solved:


Which is nice when you’re building simple square houses. But with this “decorative update”, we want to encourage people to move away from those efficient but boring shapes. What if your house has a more complicated shape?


You lack certain roof shapes: “inside corners”. And at the top, the “middle roof” needs a 3-way corner. Well, we can make these too of course.


But the reverse problem quickly announces itself as well.


The solution: “outside corners”!


And of course, there’s another missing piece: 4-way corners for middle roofs! Here they are:


Are you starting to notice the pattern? Again, the reverse problem exists too. A 4-way corner is basically 4 inside corners. There’s also four outside corners occurring in one middle roof: a pyramid shape. We’ve added that one as well!


That’s not all the options. All of these shapes are available in blue too!


The largest concern still left for the roofs is the bottom side. They lack something like roof gutters. Perhaps we can expand the quarter block system to include corner variants and upside-down variants as if they're gutters.

Building and implementing all these shapes took quite some work. Making sure the right piece is automatically selected in all circumstances is complicated. When working on the automatic adaptation, Zun found a lot of edge cases. We even found some new ones while working on this blog. But we’ve been making a lot of progress and the new roof system is 98% functional now!

Last week, all these items were “cheat-items”, they had to be spawned with commands to be tested. This week, I’ve been working to integrate them into the “real” game. Figuring out where to place them in the tech tree, how to unlock them, to what (new?) jobs the recipes ought to belong, what the ingredients should be. That’s nearly finished as well.

We’ve still got to do some last implementation things, some fixing, some adding. The controller support also needs some more work. But the 0.9.1 release is coming into view! We haven’t yet had a Summer holiday, and we won’t be taking ours before the update is out. And I’d love to have some free weeks before the leaves fall off the trees :)

Bedankt voor het lezen!

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