The condition for extended horizontal placement requires you to be with about the 45° mark in terms of deviation from the axis. It's pretty straightforward to use for bridging and nicer than holding sneak continuously. It's quite easy to build in a straight line, but taking a bend requires you to slow down a bit to get the angle around. Still, quite nice.
The vertical extension feature is a bit more finicky. It requires a pretty steep upward pitch to activate and so only really works for pillars that are already 3 nodes tall. You can add another 3 nodes of height easily and the 4th by jumping (reach according to Minetest Game creative mode). Given the narrow viewing conditions for vertical extension I'm not sure the sneak key should be necessary.
The meaning of the crosshair extensions is probably discoverable by a player who is playing on a server, by them just going and placing. The vertical extension is not as discoverable since it requires sneak (but perhaps shouldn't as I mentioned).
There is also a rate limit on placement of 0.3 seconds. This seems like a pretty sensible default but for very fast building of bridges could lead to a player falling off. I think a visual indication of when the extension is ready would help.
The other visual change I would make is that, at least in my 1080 display, the distance from the central cross to the arrows/brackets around the crosshair is slightly off-kilter, with a longer distance on the left than the right, around 1-2 pixels depending on exact window size.
The other other change I would make is to add the node's placement sound in when it's placing with the extended placement functionality. That would be much nicer since it's currently missing. If it were possible, animating the hand would be welcome - I'm not sure if it is.
P.S. In terms of code style, please start reducing the size of your if statements by negating and returning early instead of having a big pyramid of nested ones.
I greatly appreciate the feedback and tips. I'll look at incorporating most, if not all, of these changes pretty soon.
EDIT: Regarding the arm moving animation, that will probably wait for a bit. It should be possible, but it will be even higher effort than the placement sound fix, as it turns out this mod is running on the server side of things, and actually does properly send sounds and animations to other nearby players, but it doesn't happen on the client side. At least, that's my understanding, based on talking with some other devs...
The condition for extended horizontal placement requires you to be with about the 45° mark in terms of deviation from the axis. It's pretty straightforward to use for bridging and nicer than holding sneak continuously. It's quite easy to build in a straight line, but taking a bend requires you to slow down a bit to get the angle around. Still, quite nice.
The vertical extension feature is a bit more finicky. It requires a pretty steep upward pitch to activate and so only really works for pillars that are already 3 nodes tall. You can add another 3 nodes of height easily and the 4th by jumping (reach according to Minetest Game creative mode). Given the narrow viewing conditions for vertical extension I'm not sure the sneak key should be necessary.
The meaning of the crosshair extensions is probably discoverable by a player who is playing on a server, by them just going and placing. The vertical extension is not as discoverable since it requires sneak (but perhaps shouldn't as I mentioned).
There is also a rate limit on placement of 0.3 seconds. This seems like a pretty sensible default but for very fast building of bridges could lead to a player falling off. I think a visual indication of when the extension is ready would help.
The other visual change I would make is that, at least in my 1080 display, the distance from the central cross to the arrows/brackets around the crosshair is slightly off-kilter, with a longer distance on the left than the right, around 1-2 pixels depending on exact window size.
The other other change I would make is to add the node's placement sound in when it's placing with the extended placement functionality. That would be much nicer since it's currently missing. If it were possible, animating the hand would be welcome - I'm not sure if it is.
P.S. In terms of code style, please start reducing the size of your if statements by negating and returning early instead of having a big pyramid of nested ones.
I greatly appreciate the feedback and tips. I'll look at incorporating most, if not all, of these changes pretty soon. EDIT: Regarding the arm moving animation, that will probably wait for a bit. It should be possible, but it will be even higher effort than the placement sound fix, as it turns out this mod is running on the server side of things, and actually does properly send sounds and animations to other nearby players, but it doesn't happen on the client side. At least, that's my understanding, based on talking with some other devs...