Advanced Object Placement Tool + Get an Exclusive Signed Postcard (Patreon)

Hello there,

Hope you had a great week! We sure did and we are making good progress on many different aspects of Paralives, many of which will make for great Patreon posts in the near future! That’s starting today with a look at a cool new feature for expert players and master builders.

Get an Exclusive Paralives Postcard

On December 1st, 2022 everyone who is pledging on the Hero or Legend tier will be sent a Paralives postcard signed by the whole team! The postcard will feature an exclusive Paralives artwork that will get you into the holiday vibes so don’t miss it! If you would like to change your pledge tier, you can do so here. It’s also possible to upgrade your tier just to get the postcard and then downgrade again after a month. If you are already on the Hero or Legend tier and are eager to receive your postcard, don’t forget to check if your address is up to date on your Patreon profile!

We send postcards every 6 months and here’s what the last one looked like!

Mario Miravalles is the one who illustrated this postcard and he also did the next one that I can’t wait for you to see!

Advanced Object Placement Tool 

In Paralives, it’s pretty easy to move, rotate and scale objects by using simple drag and drop controls.

You can also hold the shift key of the keyboard to raise objects or even sink them into the ground.

Now, we wanted a way for advanced players and expert builders to get even more controls on how they can place objects. The tools shown above are already pretty flexible and they are easy to use but they have two limitations:

1. It is only possible to rotate objects on 1 axis. This means you cannot turn a rock upside down or rotate a tree sideways to make it seem like it fell down.
2. Objects can only be rescaled uniformly and it’s not possible to stretch them on one axis only. This means that I cannot make the rock longer, I can only make it bigger. Please note that we have a system to stretch objects like tables, beds and chairs on one axis only but it doesn’t work on objects like rocks who have a less straightforward shape that couldn’t be resized with that system.

Our solution to these two limitations was to create an optional advanced translation, rotation and scale widget. You might have seen something like it in 3D software before as it is a pretty common tool they usually have.

To use this advanced tool, simple shift+click an object while you are in build mode. Please note that the look of this tool is not final.

This gives expert players complete control over their object placement! Here’s some examples I quickly came up with:

A single rock object was duplicated, scaled, stretched and rotated.

I rotated this tree to make it look like it fell down.

Forget the pillow fort, couch fort is the new thing.

We tried to add the advanced translation, rotation and scale tool to characters and scaling down Maggie on one axis only creates a nice paper thin effect!

Beware, giant Maggie!

That’s it for today, I hope you liked this new tool! Jérémie started it during our hack week for moving characters in the photo mode and Étienne improved it recently as well as bringing it to the build mode. I’m looking forward to seeing what people will do with it! It was a relatively simple and quick feature for us to do but it will allow people to get really creative.

Have a great weekend!

Alex

Edit - March 2, 2023: This post in now public, feel free to share it!