EvilSalmon

Join Date 03/2007

Needed changes to Ship designer.

1) It only makes sense to have the ships orient in flight for the engines being the rear of the ship. As it stands you can make ships that have an obvious front, and have them fly in reverse on both the map and in tactical. It looks odd, and it messes up the animations.

Sometimes you start a ship, not know what it will look like, but if you design a look, and you go to place the engine module, and it starts off in the opposite direction, and you'd have to rotate it so it makes sense, you shouldn't You have to delete the ship you're designing and start over, or your ship will fly in reverse.

Not even sure why we can change the orientation of the engine modules in the ship design mode. They only work in one direction. Changing the orientation doesn't do anything graphically and just messes up your ship's rendering and usage on the map.

2) The designer also needs a way for you to change the size of a ship, so you can add to one and make it larger without staring again. Not everyone uses ship designs with 20 or so modules. Most my ships use around 300 individual modules. There is no saving grouped parts because a grouped part does not preserve orientation, scale, animation, inverted materials etc.

3) That brings me to another point: Saving a module should preserve all the stats you imbued into a group of components in the designer.

4) Also, I may be wrong, but I cannot for the life of me find a way to have it so my designs update with tech like the default ships, or down-grade in a new game. If this isn't an option, then it's a broken option, because you have to constantly go in and adjust the ships with every tech you research.

5) We should also be able to edit our ships, once created in the designer, in an XML file. This lets us use existing designs we've made, or made for the purpose of a mod, with ease. It also lets us correct errors we may have made during the design phase.

6) We should be able to search for a part. Even though I've used the designer a bunch of times, I'm still stuck looking at a part like Human 18, or something, and the parts not being sequential in the designer, then looking at each and every one. It's time consuming.

7) we need an Undo button, and a redo button. The redo button can only work if it's possible to delete/add the part, and if not then we get the message if something else is attached to it.

7) Lastly. We should be able to highlight a connection point via the mouse, and select a module and have it attach to that exact point. If you have a lot of points in a given space, it can be a nightmare to properly align, even if I run my mouse dps down to a LOW setting. I've had dozens of attempts to place one damn part. Delete it

On a side note: there are a few modules in the designer that have a icon that does not represent it's actual shape. You have to learn these parts, and that's just odd.

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I agree.

- An Do/Undo button. I had several times wrongly clicked somewhere, only to find that the part I had spend minutes in optimizing was removed.

- Ability to change ship base size (i.e. take a small ship, load it into medium size and then do changes on it etc.).

- Save ship parts as new parts should work

- Make ship parts invisible, i.e. engines, cannons that I have to add "obscure" the look I had in mind for the ship. I every time have to shrink and shift them "inside" hte ship so they become invisible. Make parts invisible. The button that exists doesn't seem to work for me?

- Custom ship colors of course. This is important! Even the ability to change one specific part of the ship in color (i.e. the bussard collector of my warp engine becomes red, but not other part of the ship).

- Search function for parts.

- Ability to load specific empire parts, e.g. you play as Terran but want to have one specific part of the drengin on your ship. If you want to do it now, you have to unlock "all parts", and then search through this mess for the Drengin part you are looking for. All "unlock Drengin" "Unlock Yor" etc. by Empire.

- Ability to create own ship styles (for example, a specific style of the ships by "Mister Star Trek" that do not mess with the other generic Terran style)

- Ability to create "favorite ship parts" of your own liking. Some parts I use very often, some not at all.

- In the Sims 3, you at some point have many mods for tapestries, carpets etc.. At least they were so smart to allow click a particular category, and it would expand and take a larger part of the screen to display its contents. Something similar for GC3.

- More sort options. We have a lot of parts, and, at some point, a lot of ships and templates, so it would be nice to sort them more intensely. E.g. display all user-created MEDIUM-sized ships etc., display by most recent design etc..

- As of 1.0, Colony ships, constructors etc. of other empires have received strange names, i.e. hand of fate, wood over water etc. WTF? I would like to identify "basic updated Yor colony ship" by the name.

- Ability to "auto-update" my own ship designs, perhaps per request. I.e. "make my custom colony ship up-to-date". Worked in GC2, should work in GC3.

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The_Last_Jedi

Join Date 12/2005

+24

1. If you look at the core ships in the designer you'll see that all the ships point their front towards the bottom left corner. When you use the starter block it keeps that orientation by default. So if the front of your ship doesn't match that then you know you've got the orientation wrong. If that happens you don't necessarily have to delete the ship. If you have a central part you should be able to rotate it around to face the correct way, though it might just be easier to start again.

That engine idea would not fix the problem. Engines orient based on the orientation of the part they are placed on. If they are placed on a part that is facing "backwards" they will also point backwards. So by your system the ship would then face backwards. With the ship blueprint system it isn't uncommon for the AI equipped ships in such a way, which would result in some AI ship flying backwards.

Given it can be easy to lose the front of the ship when you are rotating the camera in my opinion an easier way to fix this issue is to add back the camera controls that were in the GC2 ship designer. It was a compass control that would snap the camera to the front, back, sides and the centre returning to the default view. This would make it easy to re-identify the front of a design if you're ever unsure of where the front is.

2. Agreed. The devs have said they would look at giving us that option since they currently possess it themselves.

3. Unless I'm misunderstanding this, don't exported parts already do that?

4. User ships don't automatically upgrade. Currently the only way to do this would be to mod it in and add your ships to the ship blueprint XML. I'm not fussed about it not auto-upgrading and doing it myself, but I can understand why others wouldn't want to have to bother. Unless I'm in an extreme minority I'd prefer it not to be the default or at least having the ability, say with a checkbox, to set if it auto-upgrades or not.

5. Not a modder so I have no real opinion on this.

6. Not sure how useful a search would be, but better filters would be great especially when you have all styles enabled.

7. Agree. Undo button would be great. This has been a common request since the designer came out.

8. Double agree. Another request that was made during the beta. The hardpoint dance gets real old, real fast.

Another thing I'd add would be that the copy function of GC2 returns. In GC2 when you clicked on a part on a ship and then back on the same part in the part list it copied the settings of the used part and applied them to the new part. Symmetry did reduce the need of this a bit, but there are plenty of times where you don't want to use symmetry because you don't want it to flow through all connected parts.

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there is an easy way to see the right orientation of the ship. Any part you pick prior to adding it to the ship will aim forward.

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Quoting The Sisko,

reply 2

If you have a central part you should be able to rotate it around to face the correct way, though it might just be easier to start again.

This only works when you have a simple design. My design that was affected has over 300 parts. Often when designing a huge ship you can't see what direction is what until you get to the engines. You rotate the designer so many times you lose track of what direction is what.

Then you go to put the engines on and you have 300+ parts between you and the starter block. You cannot rotate them. When you do, you shift dozens and dozens of other parts in weird and stupid ways.

I made a small ship that only used about 30 parts. That was easy enough, but it's a simple design.

I find the designer to be quite limited and not worth the time to make anything other than a simple shuttle.

Quoting The Sisko,

reply 2

3. Unless I'm misunderstanding this, don't exported parts already do that?

No, If you have a lot of rotations, you shift the parts around to separate them etc. they all get smashed back to default status and all clumped up in a nasty way. I've seen some hilarious saved parts when I link 15 or so parts as one.

Quoting The Sisko,

reply 2

I'm not fussed about it not auto-upgrading

It can be tedious beyond tedious to go in and change every single gun, engine, shield, etc. over and over with each tech you burn through. Not only that if you have a space reducing tech you have to go back in and change that as well. Then when you get to the end of the game and have all the highest tech items on the ship, and you start another game... You have to go in and delete everything again, and start over... Redundant beyond redundant... It's a time waster for no gain at all.

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This is the ship I'm referring to. There is no way to rotate one part.

Apparently there is more than 1 step to uploading a picture than just posting the link with the image button, so I won't be doing it. Seems to be out-dated forum controls.

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They really need to fix how parts are sorted. In the by-type style sorting, you have cockpits in the first category(that has no title), engines in the wing category, and various other things scattered about. Really could use some work.

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