Holobuildings: Screenshots & Manual

• General
• Manual
o General information
o Opening the Editor
▪ Moving the map
▪ Zooming in and out
▪ Start Editing
o Creating a new Blueprint
o DRAWING MODES
o EDITING MODES
▪ Polygon not selected
▪ Polygon Selected
▪ Polygon editing mode
▪ Rotation & Scaling Mode
o EDITING TOOLS
o Blueprint Information
▪ Polygons & Vertex counter
▪ Volume & Costs
o Height and elevation
o Managing your Blueprints
▪ Saving a Blueprint
o Red Dots, Blueprints, etc
General
The ability for users to build and create is very important to us so let’s begin laying out the
holographic version of Earth 2! This will be the first of a series of releases relating to Earth 2
HOLOBUILDINGS. In addition to visualization the plan is for HoloBuildings to serve a number of
purposes, some now with more in the future. For now:

• Players can visualize and deploy building layouts on their properties

• Holobuildings will provide extra storage space on a property
• It is intended that the creation of holobuildings on a property will improve some key
variables inside the future Earth 2 EcoSim and may even serve as an initiation point,
which can be backdated, for future in game resources.

In this first release, players will become able to create Blueprints and then save, edit and delete
them. All of these actions will come at no cost for you, the player.

Manual
General information

Holobuildings are not buildings but Holograms of buildings. At this point you cannot produce
anything with them, but having them still initiates certain benefits, since essentially Earth 2 has
a virtual nature just like holograms.

For instance: Holograms will be able to store Raw Materials up to a certain degree. If you build
them, your properties will start storing some Raw Materials - the data is not visible to you just
yet, but they will have begun. Once the Economic Simulation and industrial production begins,
these records will be revealed and available to those who created and deployed holobuildings,
giving that player a head start.

They will have multiple small advantages further down the road that will surely justify their
small construction cost.

Please note: These are construction costs. Designing blueprints for later construction is free of
charge. Only the number of blueprints you can save is limited to 100. So have fun creating
blueprints without deploying! It’s free of charge!

Opening the Editor

Login, click on your account and select the button to open the Holobuildings editor. This will
open the editor view.
 In the upper left corner you have four
buttons (f.l.t.r):

1.) Map view

2.) Satellite View
3.) 3D-View
4.) Search Field: Here you can enter
search strings to move the camera to
certain places.

Moving the map

You can move the map around by navigating when the left mouse button is held down.

Zooming in and out

In the lower left hand corner you will find buttons to zoom in and out of the map. Please note
that you need to be zoomed in to the grid level in order to use the editor.

Top to bottom:

Zoom in

Zoom to grid

Zoom out

The editor will ensure you are zoomed in and the grid is visible when you begin to create or edit
a blueprint.
 After ensuring you are zoomed in enough, the editor will lock zooming such that you
cannot zoom out past the grid level. You can toggle this behaviour with the lock icon
above the zoom buttons (visible only when editing).

Start Editing

In the upper right corner, you see the tabs for two lists: your blueprints and (greyed out for
now) your holobuildings. While you can create and edit the first blueprints, the feature to
actually create and place holobuildings is not part of the initial release. We expect the
placement of holobuildings to be ready for the next release.

At first start you will see that you have not yet created any blueprints. Click on the “Create my
first Blueprint”-Button on the right side to begin creation of your first blueprint.

If you already have blueprints you can choose between “Create new Blueprint” or left clicking
on one of the entries in your list of saved blueprints and then choose the option for Edit.

For now let’s assume you just opened the editor for the first time. It should look like this:

Now click on “Create my first Blueprint”. If the view isn’t zoomed in enough it will automatically
zoom in now.
Creating a new Blueprint

After clicking on “Create my first blueprint”, a lock appears above the zoom buttons on the
bottom left, indicating that the zoom to grid is locked now. You can unlock it if you need a
better overview by clicking on it.

When creating blueprints, the buttons on the right-hand side of the map
appear. (Top to bottom):

1. Draw Polygon (1)

2. Draw Rectangle (2)

There are also a number of buttons below them:

3. Unification (ctrl+u)
4. Difference (ctrl+d)
5. Intersection (ctrl+i)
6. Match Borders (ctrl+m)
7. Clone (ctrl+c)
8. Delete (delete, del, backspace)

Buttons 1-2 are DRAWING MODES

Buttons 3-8 are EDITING TOOLS and depend on the current selection

Note: When drawing you are constricted to a 7.5 km square in which to

create a blueprint. For now you can move the map wherever you want
(and make use of the geocoding search), however, when you click “create
blueprint” you will be locked down to the current area until you exit that
mode with the cancel button in the bottom right corner.
At the bottom you find three more buttons:

1. Undo (ctrl+z)
2. Redo (ctrl+shift+z)
3. Help

With the two buttons on the top you can undo your last step or - in case
you undid something you want to keep - redo it. The last button opens this
document (so you probably figured that one out already).

DRAWING MODES

DRAWING MODES will always snap to the grid. So will some of the editing modes (more on
these later). The summary is: if something can snap to the grid it will/should. If you wish to
avoid snapping, keep Shift pressed while dragging, rotating, scaling, etc.

To draw any polygon shape:

• Left click the 1st button or press 1

• Left click once on the map on a place where you want a corner of your buildings to be.
Do NOT hold the mouse button. The editor will create what is called a vertex: a point
that will stay attached to your mouse cursor via a line. Click a second time to create
another vertex.
• Keep clicking to place more vertices with the intention of creating a shape to your liking.
If you have at least 3 vertices, you can close the polygon. To do so by left-clicking on the
last placed vertex or the first one.

You can also draw a perfectly shaped rectangle by clicking the 2nd button or press 2, then left
click once on the map to start drawing (Do NOT hold the mouse button diagonally over the
map). Then move the mouse. You will see the rectangle being created under your mouse. Left
click again to finish the drawing when the shape is to your liking.
EDITING MODES

There are three EDITING MODES:

1. Selection (s)
2. Polygon Editing (e)
3. Scaling & Rotating Polygons (r)

Editing Modes are not Editing Tools. Editing Tools will be explained later. Editing Modes are
modes with which you can edit an existing polygon in a certain way.

Polygon not selected

If a polygon is not selected, you cannot edit it in any way. In order to select it, click on it. In
order to return back to selection mode from any other mode, press “s”.

You can always deselect a blueprint by clicking into an empty space on the map or by pressing
escape. This also works for cancelling drawing.

Polygon Selected
When a polygon is selected you can move it around by clicking into it, holding the mouse
button and moving the mouse. On release of the mouse button the blueprint will be placed at
the current position of the mouse. It usually snaps to grid which you can avoid by keeping the
shift key pressed during the placement.

Selection Mode can be used to select multiple Polygons together. You can Shift+Click to
select/deselect features one by one, or you can shift+drag (left mouse button) to select
everything under the drawn selection rectangle. You can move selected features together, but
you cannot edit them together. Selected features are numbered from 1 onwards. This will
become important when we turn towards the Editing Tools!

You can switch to Polygon editing mode with another Click or by pressing “e”!

Polygon editing mode

If you are not satisfied with the general shape of your building, you can edit single vertices in
this mode. Just click on one vertex, hold the mouse button and move the vertex into the right
position. Then release the mouse button.
Repeat as often as you like.

If you need more vertices in a certain area for a more complex shape, just click on one of the
yellow dots, and the neighboring lines will show new vertices.

You can select multiple vertices via shift + left click and drag them together.

In order to delete vertices, please select those you want to delete and then hit the “Delete”
button, the Del key or “Backspace”.

Click again into the shape to switch to Rotation and Scaling Mode - or press “r”
Rotation & Scaling Mode

To scale the blueprint you can click on one of the vertices and increase or decrease the building
to your liking.

In order to rotate it, just click on the yellow rotation symbol (here left of the floorplan) and
rotate it around the center of the blueprint.

Pressing “r” again will change the pivots for scaling and rotating between “center pivot” and
“opposite vertex“.

The rules for snapping to grid apply of course.

EDITING TOOLS

Unification, Difference, Intersection (Buttons 3-5) depend on the selection order! Whichever
operation is chosen from this range, it will be applied to 1st and 2nd selected features, the result
of that will be applied with 3rd selected feature, the result of that will be applied to the 4th
selected and so on. Algorithm checks if the operation can be applied, if it cannot, it will stop. So
if 1 & 2 cannot be intersected, nothing will happen. If 1 & 2 are intersected but the result
cannot reach 3, then algorithm will stop and selection 3, 4, etc will be untouched.

Please note that:

• during these operations - and depending on which you have chosen - vertices
automatically can and will be added, changed and/or removed from your polygons
• other properties of later polygons will be inherited from polygon 1. E.g. if we unify
multiple shapes of different heights and elevations, the final result will have the height
and elevation of “shape 1”.
Unification: will combine two or more selected and overlapping polygons into one.

Difference: The part of polygon 1 that does not overlap with polygon 2 remains. Shapes 2, 3, 4,
etc are used to cut into shape 1. Hint: placing a “shape 2” completely within “shape 1” and
selecting both of them (order does not matter in this particular case) will create a hole in
“shape 1”

Intersection: keeps only the overlapping area of 2 shapes

Match Borders is smart way to change polygons so they perfectly fit together without unifying
them. Selection doesn’t matter, it’ll figure everything out. It make sure that shapes are nicely
glued together without overlapping. It does not remove shapes. It only edits them.

Cloning copies the selected polygons and places the copy into the same place (which turns
everything red, since now the clone and the original overlap. You can easily drag the clone to
another place and do with it whatever you could do with the original.

Blueprint Information

On the right side you find a dark grey rectangle, containing some important information. Right
now it looks quite empty, but once you will have created a few dozen blueprints it will show
them as a list.

In the top you find a section containing information about the blueprint you are currently
working on. You can enter a name for the Blueprint here, you see the number of used polygons,
the number of vertices, the total volume and the amount of E-Dollars this volume would cost
you.
Up to 1000 cubic meters on a property can serve as a preliminary storage space for the
resources that your property will already start to produce while Holobuildings are on it. You
cannot see now what kind of resources and how much. But believe us: Once you have
holobuildings, you have started to collect resources.

Polygons & Vertex counter

We would like not to do that, but we still have to bow to the gods of computing power!

If literally hundreds of thousands of people can fill a map with their own 3D buildings (be they
holograms or not), we obviously need to put in some restrictions in terms of the faces those
buildings have, because complex geometry needs more computing power. Thus we have to
count the vertices your designs have - and at a certain point you will get a warning, that this
building cannot be constructed anymore on this specific properties. So always have the vertex
counter in view.

Volume & Costs

We calculate the prices of a building by cubic meters. Currencies will be E-Dollars and Essence.
It might be that Essence will not yet be available on the day we release the construction of
buildings. But rest assured: it won’t take long anymore until it will be available.

Height and elevation

At the bottom you find two input windows, one for Height and one for elevation.

Height will define the height of the body of the polygon you currently have selected. The entry
is in meters. 2 Decimal numbers are possible, so you’re able to define the height up to a
centimeter.

Elevation will define the height the body will be elevated above the ground. This does not
mean you can create flying buildings, though, but you can stack blocks: If the block on the
bottom has a height of 10m then the block on top of it must have an elevation of 10m. If there
are 3 blocks stacked on top of one another, first one has 15m and second one has 10m, then
the 3rd block will have an elevation of 25m (the sum of the heights of the blocks under it)
This allows you to create more complex buildings with parts not directly connected to the
ground themselves like this one:

The connections between the two towers have been created as polygons on the ground. Then
they were elevated to the height they have now and connected with the towers using the
“Merging” tool.

The same method created the upper half of the towers.

The entry is in meters. 2 Decimal numbers are possible, so you’re able to define the height up
to a centimeter.

Managing your Blueprints

Saving a Blueprint

Once you are satisfied with your Blueprint or want to save it for continuing later, you can save it
at the bottom right with the save button. Don’t forget to give the Blueprint a unique name.

The Saved Blueprints will appear in the list of Blueprints on the right side of the sceen.

In the “Search my Blueprints” field you can enter a text to filter your Blueprints.
If you left-click once on a Blueprint, you can find more details about it:

• Creation Date
• Last Modification Date
• Volume
• Costs

You will also find the choice to edit the Blueprint, to clone it or to delete it.

• The “Edit” icon on the left will simply load the Blueprint for you to edit it.
• The “Clone” icon will create an identical copy of this blueprint.
• If you click on the “Delete” icon, another dialog will open:

With “Cancel” you return to the former screen. With “Permanently Delete” you will
permanently delete the Blueprint. In both cases we will warn you about accidentally losing your
work, so please check if you really want to move forward.
Red Dots, Blueprints, etc

If the Blueprints show a red point in their list or the bodies of your
blueprints turn red on the map overview, that means they have
issues and they later cannot be built in this state. There are a
couple of reasons for that:

1.) Polygons intersect

2.) Polygon bodies don't have a path to ground: they need to touch
the ground themselves or connect with other polygons that
eventually touch the ground

3.) Polygons exceed size or max number of vertices

4.) Polygons reach across the border of the building area

All of these cases can be solved by either merging the polygons,

scaling them or moving them.

Clicking anywhere on that item in the list opens the menu on the
left, where you can choose to modify the Blueprint in order to solve
the issues - or to delete the Blueprint.