Limits and Tips

Limits and tips

SignLink stays inside what the game itself can do. The measured numbers are in what a sign can hold and how sign text renders.

• One sign shows at most 50 000 pixels. Bigger pictures use stacked copies of the sign; on a server the size limits above decide how much detail fits.
• A single-player world moved to a server keeps its big signs. The limits are checked when you put something on a sign in a shared world, so a single-player world can hold bigger pictures. Moved to a server later, arriving players wait for them, and a sign over 512 KiB cannot be sent at all.
• Big pictures take a moment to appear when a player walks up: the download (about 150 KB/s on a server), then roughly 13 µs per pixel while the game builds the text.
• GIFs move only where the file is. Their frames are not saved in the world, so a GIF moves on the computers that have it in their images folder; everyone else sees its first frame.
• Very long GIFs. A GIF can have up to 5 000 frames (about 720 frames at 1920 x 1080). All moving GIFs share the GIF memory (256 MB; 512 or 1024 MB in Settings › Playback if your PC has the RAM). A GIF too long for it plays every second or third frame at the same speed, and one too big to move at all goes up as a still picture. The Moving row on 2 Content tells you which before you put it up.
• The game's own sign editor cuts long text. A player without SignLink who presses E on a picture sign and then Enter cuts it to 50 characters (Escape leaves it alone). Their game also slows down while they look at a picture sign's board up close. With SignLink, E opens SignLink instead and the hover shows one short line. Tip: hide the sign in a wall or the ground with only its picture showing (3 Place slides the picture along the sign), and there is nothing left to aim at.
• A sign is still a building piece. It needs support: a sign left floating breaks, and a ceiling picture's sign has to touch the beam or floor it hangs from.
• A picture lies on its sign's face. Anything in front of that face, such as the beams of a log wall, shows through it. The red part of the highlight warns you before you put it up.
• Signs take the scene's light by default. In the shade a label is dark; set it to Glowing to read it day and night. Tip: turn Bloom off in the game's graphics settings: glowing pictures look much sharper without it.
• Keyboard and mouse only. No controller support.
• Client-side only. A dedicated server does not need it.