I was reading on the kickstarter goals and the future of Cata and I’m really excited, but I was wondering about how obstructions and furniture is handled currently, you either have a see-through obstruction that is climbable like a fence, a slow terrain type like a counter or a window, water and a straight up impassable wall. (har, har). Then there is the construction options that let you build things like fences, furniture and pits/spike pits.
Assuming the system is going to be multi-layered, where an empty block below the player equals a hole, and he falls through, a solid block in front of the player counts a a wall, a half-block counts as a fence/furniture and a door/window are special walls you can pass through…
My suggestion is two fold, that the construction system let you build up full-blocks of wall with dirt, logs for professional walls, and piles of bodies, car parts (like a junk yard) broken furniture, garbage for makeshift walls that are faster to build. Then you can make half-height “walls” with said bodies/logs/tires/boulders either by crafting or by just pushing things around. A large enough boulder, for example, would count as a slow-terrain half block like a counter top. A destroyed wall could have several states, see-through impassable (window/cracked), half-block-see-thru passable (broken window essentially) and just rubble.
A car would count as a slow-terrain half-block as it does now, but there could be an option to take a car, say a standard car 4x6 and flip it, (with enough strength/a jack) turn it into a full-sized wall… the only caveat I see with this is that, all of a sudden you have a four-story wall… there are some scale issues with cars I guess, but maybe only making a shortcut to the car parts wall, making a 4x6 car a 1x1x6 one block high-impassible wall since you ‘wrecked it’ by flipping it? Would be interesting to see if someone manages to get enough cybernetic strength to flip a school bus…
The next suggestion is for build able floors and stairs… I realize there are ( quite a bit) of suggestions to things like Dwarf Fortress, but they have some of the best grasps of 3d layers I’ve ever seen. You need a stair or a half-block to get down to a lower level without hurting yourself, you can have a floor above an empty hole since floors don’t take up vertical space. This leads to some interesting things, covered traps, trap doors, hatches, grates, sub-terranian cave systems, sewers, ziggurats, ramparts.