Oh, that … thing … again. I’m gonna have to make a post to explain it and then just link to it, because it’s starting to get old.
Funny you should mention math, because that’s exactly the problem with the right-angle triangle piece. The wedges we have are equilateral triangles, meaning that all sides are the same length, and that’s the same as the square side length. Let’s call that length s.
If you add a right-angle triangle block, two of its sides will also have the length s, but its hypotenuse will have the length s×√2. Nothing could snap to that side, because all the other pieces – foundations, ceilings, wedges, walls, doors, everything – have meshes and textures that were created for the side length of s.
Having a foundation on top of which you can’t build anything else except that same foundation is useless. So Funcom would have to add a new variant of all the other pieces, such as walls, doors, etc.
First of all, that’s a lot of work – new meshes, textures, blueprints, etc. – so they probably wouldn’t do it just based on that alone. But the problems with the idea don’t stop there.
Imagine having two variants of every single building piece. For example, “Turanian Wall” and “Turanian Wall (Wide)”, “Aquilonian Frame” and “Aquilonian Frame (Wide)”, etc. It’s a usability nightmare. Ask anyone who’s used the Frontier building pieces how many times they made a mistake and built a window instead of a wall or vice versa. That’s because the item icons are extremely similar. The same thing would happen with all the pieces if they had a “wide” variant. And on top of that, you have people on consoles, where there’s no search box in the crafting menu.
Fortunately, it turns out that you don’t really need the right-angle triangle, because there’s so much you can do with the existing pieces beyond simple cubes. I mean, if you don’t believe me, look at all the entries for all the building contests Funcom organized.
Here are some additional building tips: