For the past long while I've been bouncing around some ideas in my head for a Space Engineers-style sci-fi building game - in particular, how the whole "building" system actually works. There's like three/four primary elements I'd love to see combined:
- Rust-style building grid composed of both cubes and equilateral-triangle prisms, to offer lots of flexibility
- Stationeers-style large/small-grid combo, where the small grid is aligned to the edges of the large grid, and large grid is used for structural stuff (walls, floors, etc) while small-grid is used for pipes, wires, furniture, etc
- Building off that, using the small grid for making smaller vehicles & such, like in SE
- Some sort of node-and-ellipse-based system (think roads in Cities: Skylines) for making long, linear objects (cables, long paths, possibly train tracks & such) that can have freeform curves and connect grids that aren't aligned
However, points 1 and 2 run into some significant trouble when combined - there'd have to be so many contextual variants of things like pipe/wire junctions to accommodate for the small-grid pattern differences between not just the two types of building block, but the places where they meet (not to mention figuring out how that grid would work with the triangular pieces anyway).