GearBlocks – Scenarios: Making Your Own Kit Build

How to set up build stages for your construction, and then make your own custom kit build scenario with it.

Introduction

The Kit Build scenario included in GearBlocks allows you to build an example construction by following a sequence of build stages, step by step.

Well, you can kit build your own construction designs too! This guide shows how to set up your construction’s build stages, and then make a custom kit build scenario with it. No Lua scripting knowledge is needed.

Note: It’s best to do this once you have finished creating your construction, and are happy with it’s design. If you change it afterwards, you might have to redo the build staging setup.

The Kit Building Tool

In order for a construction to be used as a kit build, each of its parts needs to be assigned a Stage Index. When playing a kit build scenario, these indices determine which parts are added at each build stage.

Before getting started, load your construction into an empty scene, and make sure all of its parts are selected (with the flashing orange outline) using the builder tool.

To set up the part stage indices, there’s an included script mod you can use. Enter the SCRIPT MODS screen, and select the “built-in examples” tab. Then select KitBuildingTool, and click the “Load and Run” button:

The Kit Building Tool has the following options:

• Construction ID – ID of the construction to work on (type in a number or target a construction to set this).
• Select Parts up to Stage – Select the parts in the construction up to and including the specified stage.
• Selected Part(s) Stage Idx – Set the stage of the currently selected parts, Decrement / Increment the stage of the currently deselected parts.
• Preview Construction’s Stage – Set / Decrement / Increment the construction’s active stage (hiding any parts in higher stages).

Don’t worry about remembering all this now, this guide will cover how to use the tool in the next section.

Setting Up Build Stages

The best way to set up build staging is to start with the last stage and work your way backwards. The Kit Building Tool allows you to do this without needing to know ahead of time how many build stages you’ll end up with.

Important: First, target one of the parts of your construction to set the construction ID into the tool.

Now, deselect the parts you want to be added last in the final build stage. For example, here the two rear wheels are deselected:

Note: While the Kit Building Tool is running, a yellow number over the targeted part shows its current stage index.

Press the Numpad + key to increment the stage index for the deselected parts (or you can click the Inc for Deselected button in the tool window):

Notice that the indices for the deselected parts have been incremented to 1, while the rest are still at index 0.

To preview the effect of what you’ve just done, press Page Up (or click the Dec Active Stage button) to decrement the construction’s active stage:

The parts in stage 1 are now hidden. Don’t worry, they haven’t gone anywhere! If you increment the active stage (press Page Down) you’ll see them again.

Next, deselect the parts you want to be in the second-to-last build stage:

Increment the build stage for the deselected parts:

And decrement the construction’s active stage to preview the result:

At this point, the parts you first deselected should have stage index 2, the parts you next deselected should have index 1, and everything else (still selected) should have stage index 0.

Now you just need to rinse and repeat. Deselect more parts, and increment their stage indices:

Keep going, stage by stage, until you end up with just one part left:

This last remaining part will be the first stage of your kit build, and should be left with stage index 0.

The parts you first deselected should end up with the highest stage index, and should be in the final build stage.

As a final check, use Page Up / Page Down to preview each build stage to make sure everything looks OK.

Some Tips:

• Make sure each stage builds off the previous ones. When a player is adding parts in a build stage, they need to be able align them to parts that have already been added in previous stages!
• Don’t have too many parts in each stage, somewhere between 2 and 6 is probably about right.
• If you make a mistake and need to fix some part stage indices, you can explicitly set them with Set Idx for Selected Part(s) in the Kit Building Tool (type in a number and press return to set the index value).
• If you need to reselect all the parts that haven’t been assigned a stage yet (i.e. are still on stage 0), you can use Select Parts up to Stage in the tool.

Making a Kit Build Scenario

Now you’re ready to create a custom kit build scenario, to do this you’ll need to save out the scene as a scenario.

Important: To avoid confusion, make sure your construction is the only one in the scene!

Enter the SAVE SCENE screen. Give it a name, description, and add “scenario” as a tag, then click the Save button.

To make your kit build scenario work, it needs to have a scenario Lua script, but you don’t need to write your own. There is an example kit build scenario available on the Workshop that you can copy the Lua script from.

Search for KitBuildExample on the Workshop and subscribe to it now.

Then enter the LOAD SCENE screen, and select the “workshop downloads” tab. Select the KitBuildExample scenario, and click the “Open Containing Folder” button:

Staying in the LOAD SCENE screen, select the “locally saved” tab, then select your saved scene, and click the “Open Containing Folder” button.

You should now have two instances of Windows Explorer open, one with the KitBuildExample Workshop download folder, and the other with your own scene folder.

Now copy the scenario.lua file from the workshop download folder into your saved scene folder (be careful to copy only this file, you don’t want to overwrite your save!):

That’s it! Your custom kit build scenario should now be ready to play.

Enter the BEGIN SCENARIO screen, select the “locally saved” tab, and launch your kit build scenario from there.