Question/Idea re the ship designer's "hide part" function

from GalCiv3 Forums

I use the "hide part" in the designer as design help, to check parts behind others or place stuff there -- I guess that is what the hide function is for? But I assume (never tested) that saving a ship with a "hidden" part does still show this part in the game/battle viewer, so activating "hide" does only work in the designer?

 

Because I thought it would actually be nice to place components to get the stats up but have them really hidden, so that they do not show up in game anymore.

 

Why? Well, because I remember the nifty tool in GC2 Ultimate allowed you to easily customize ships styles for all civs, but the AI had the annoying habit to place weapons or other components in absurd places and sizes on your carefully crafted custom designs.

 

If "hide part" would work in-game in GC3 we could just design ships and set all components the AI would place as "hidden" so they do not mess up the look...

 

 

 

 

15,832 views 2 replies
Reply #1 from GalCiv3 Forums Top

I use "hide part" extensively in game.  There used to be a bug where if you shift selected a bunch of parts and hid them it didn't actually take effect in game.  I haven't tried that in a long while.  It may or may not still be bugged.  But many of my basic hull templates depend on hidden parts staying hidden in game for their animation illusions to work.  When I manually add hidden equipment to ship designs, saving the design as a ship, the equipment components stay hidden.

You are looking for some template setting that allows a hardpoint to say, "the next weapon goes here and becomes invisible." or something similar.  I have played a bit with encoded placement in a template.  I have a Colony ship template that uses the Colony component as part of the visual design.  I have it offset and mirrored in such a way that the dome shape of the component appears as a little sphere in the center of the design.  When I used the template, added my first component as that Colony module, and let the Designer automatically place that part, it would come up on that hardpoint with the offsets and mirroring preserved.  So, things like that are possible.

Right now, my posted template on Steam, called "Colon" still does that, but it does it to the second part I let the Ship Designer place, not the first one.  I have no idea what changed to cause that change in behavior.  It took me a long while to figure out the information was still hidden there in the template somehow.  My workaround is to first place some other equipment, like an engine, and then place the Colony component, letting the Designer do the placement.  The Colony module pops into place.  Then I hide the engine.  So, pre-placement works, sort of, but I have no idea just how it works anymore.

Reply #2 from GalCiv3 Forums Top

Hey thanks, that's a nice bit of info. I didn't know about the early shift select thing and did not look into templates myself much yet.

 

I understand Crusade will make it easy to define custom ships styles for every civ. So I'm wondering if the AI would tend to mess up those by placing weapons etc. so that it looks silly, and what means we'd have to prevent that.

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