the main topic to which this post stresses about is: if this is system is gonna be improved by the dev team in any way, in future patches or DLC’s. Because as I tried just a few days ago this “refreshed” FF, it seems it isn’t fully fleshed out yet, and there’s still room to changes and improvements.
for example:
roads, the placement of roads is still fundamentally bound to a “masked” grid system;
the way we can shape roads is basically limited to the way they’ve always been right?
are there plans to make the “road/path” system more flexible too?
Crop fields, still completely bound to the grid system;
I want to point out one thing, let’s take as example: “graveyards”, the structure is still bound to a grid, but the team made it a “two step” process:
choose the size (squared);
place freely;
So from this came immediately the thought if this is gonna be applied to crop fields too…
Or if the team has in consideration of reworking their placement completely.
fences, walls etc, still only possible to work them vertically and diagonally
same question, are they gonna take full advantage of a gridless system?
absolutely i know this fact very well… And this is why i find this change in perspective amazing.
it was dead set in stone that they would’ve never changed the placement system, and yet here we are… The thing that concerns me is, if now they are going to improve it, change the rest of the in-game “structures”, to make them take advantage of the system in a better way.
Doesn’t it show you grid lines (and, of course, snap to them) when you’re in gridded mode and not when you’re not? Admittedly, I have found I sometimes forget which mode I’m in and expect to be in the other one. (but I use grid-snapping a lot because I’m used to it.)
I’ll grant that noticing whether it a building rotates in 90 degree or 45 degree increments is too clunky for just seeing which mode it is, but that’s another way to check.
Quick edit to add:
Maybe it’s just the way I look at things, (i.e. from the grid first) but I feel like free-place mode doesn’t actually get you off the grid. It just hides what it’s doing with the grid until you go back and look at things in grid mode. (and discover that it’s taking up a lot of extra space in that mode, usually!)
In terms of how you place your buildings you definitely are off the grid, however, the caveat is that certain systems (roads and walls) are still hooked into the grid system and thus behave oddly in tandem with gridless mode.
It’s mostly roads, to be honest. For example, I was experimenting with placing roads off-grid. Typically, placing two roads next each other forces a small gap between them, but I somehow managed to place two roads next to each other in such a way that they look like one double-wide road with no in-between gap. I was really surprised by how it allowed me to do that. After experimenting more, I realised you could do this in grid mode too, but only when the roads are facing a certain diagonal direction that somehow evades the normal road grid logic. I’ve been playing this game for ages and I’ve never seen this road behaviour before, so I figured it must be something new as a result of shifts to the underlying grid system.
I decided to push it further and ended up adding another road so that it looks like an almost seamless triple-wide road. It’s weird that this is only possible on the diagonal though. The road system behaves in such odd ways, which can be both fun and surprising, but also frustrating sometimes. Gridless mostly enhances the surprising part…
Unfortunately, even though the double-wide gate is the perfect width for these roads, I couldn’t get it to align with them, so had to go with the single-width gate.
It’s everything to do with pathing. … and precisely diagonal roads can be layered in gridded mode because they actually only sit on squares along that diagonal.
First, I agree with the OP that the roads and fences, fields and cemetery should be gridless too if in that mode. I also understand that there are software limitations that need to be overcome to do so.
Plus, an analog representation of a digital value is inherently imperfect.
I would like the option to have the grid visible whether you are in grid or gridless build mode.
Yes, you can move things if necessary, but having the grid visible would allow placement with sufficient space for future expansion. Then you would have less need to go through the process of moving a building, along with the delay as it is moved.
Really feeling the limitations of wall placement in my current town. They look so wrong being stuck at rigid angles when the rest of the town is free-form. I feel like placement of walls/fences should operate similarly to how you place bridges. They don’t have to curve, you just need to select a viable starting point, then drag in any direction until you stop and place. Hopefully they can figure out how to make it happen.
yeah exactly, that’s why it would be nice to have some kind of insight from the devs, about the gridless system, and if they’re planning to improve it in any way, and change the rest of the “structures” i’ve listed that still are bound to the grid. That would be extremely nice to know.
