Ship Design Feedback

All good stuff, i will say most of these issues are already being addressed, and will be in the beta.

Please, please, please, please, please, please, please...  

The hardpoints are really hard... but at least the offset helps to put things in the desired place.

I definitely agree about a better way to move and rotate the camera.  I can't say I was wild about the GC2 controls that allowed you to rotate the ship, but I think something is needed besides the middle mouse button.  Also, I was very confused for a while until I realized that the zoom to cursor setting applies in this window as well as the main map - I was trying to zoom in and the ship was moving across the screen. Perhaps a separate setting for that is needed for the ship designer window.

I am finding the hardpoints hard to find.  In this view, for example, the blue hardpoint is almost invisible:

I haven't had a chance to watch the twitch stream yet so I don't know if it's covered there, but I still haven't figured out how to rotate the camera around the ship/rotate the ship to see it from different angles. I mean if you don't have any modules/components selected (I know how to rotate those easily enough), how do you rotate it? It's probably something very obvious in front of my face but I'm just not seeing it. Thanks.

Hold the middle mouse-button and move the mouse.

Thanks for that! I actually did try doing that but had forgotten that I changed my scroll wheel button (my middle mouse button) to show/hide the desktop. Once I read your reply and changed it back to being a middle button it worked perfectly.

Good stuff here, I did address many of these issues in the Twitch, but let me really quick mention of issues we are already fixing.

1. Harpoits, this is the number one issue we are all fighting, we tried to be clever and have them generated dynamically. (lets just way we learned a lesson, and move on , The artist are currently going through and manually placing the hard point, and so all these issues should be fixed in the next Big build. As part of this we will be fixing the way that placing things on hardpoints is done, which will make making ships look good fast should be leaps and bounds better.

2. User Interface, we have already begun, re working the interface for both the shipyard and the designer. That should address most usability issues.

3. Camera movement is the same as in the GC2 designer, we will be bringing back the Camera control panel, as an option for players who want to be able to have more control of fixed angles etc.

Over all we have a lot more planned, but as you can see its hard to keep the screen from becoming overly complicated, however we still have to make sure our hard core designers can get to the more advanced features, this will be a balancing act that we will be playing with over the next few months, the more feedback we get the better, so keep it up. If i don't respond, it's not because we are not listing, it most likely because it is a known issue that we are already addressing.

We hope to have the Ship Designer Feature complete, with possibly the exception of placing particles, by the Beta.

Hope this feedback is helpful.

Totally love new shipdesigner! Offset and mirroring great additions!!

Yes, very! I also just got to watch the Twitch stream you guys did and that helped to educate me a bit more. I'll have to give building a ship another try and see what my 2nd attempt comes up with now. Thanks.

Might I suggest an advanced mode and a standard mode are the way to go, that way you can allow people to switch between a quick easy snap a few bits to hard points and go interface and a more 3D modeling type interface that for instance doesn't use hardpoints and allows you to freely align things,etc.

Rather than try and design one UI to rule them all I'm saying have a simple and an advanced UI and a toogle button to switch between them.

Either way as you have acknowledged the UI needs some rework. Look forward to having the chance to see the stream as it sounds like I might pick up some tips on things that aren't obvious.

"The artist are currently going through and manually placing the hard point, and so all these issues should be fixed in the next Big build. As part of this we will be fixing the way that placing things on hardpoints is done, which will make making ships look good fast should be leaps and bounds better."

Thank you.  Even with the option in the Ship Designer Options/Hardpoint Density, getting a good number and placement of hardpoints was tough.  My thought: Hardpoints should be at the basic X/Y/Z axis of each part at a minimum.  I also got some strange angles when I used symmetry, as if the hardpoint was just slightly off center.

Cant you just drop hardpoints all together and make it possible to connect at any point? Maybe set a minimim surface of contact and/ or maximum distance from base module.

Once again thanks for the INFO!

When you redo the hardpoints - will use users be able to add hardpoints to some of the pieces if we really want to have a piece on a hardpoint at this particular spot.

We may add this ability, in  the future, if needed. We want to see how well the new hard points work, before we decide if it is required.

Thank you, @mormegil, it sounds like you are already addressing the points I raised.  I'm looking forward to the next update!

cheers. 

Having watched the first 23 minutes of the stream now I'm really pleased to see that they are already working on the UI and adding 3D gizmo's. I still think that getting rid of hardpoints and just allowing us to move parts into alignment freely is the way to go but if I can do that anyway by holding ctrl hardpoints are no skin of my nose.

I'm loving some of the new additions, such as offsets and the additional animation controls.

- What I would like to see is some better feedback on why I can't remove an item, perhaps some highlights of the offending items. Similarly to the component bar and the 3d view linked highlights.

- I would like some better feedback on what is the front and back (though that might come with the addition of the old camera controls as was mentioned earlier).

- It would also be nice to have some base components that are basically only hardpoints, not unlike Kryo's Hull System mod for GC2. This would allow for some more creative combinations without being limited to fixed starting components.

- Why is the tiny starting only fitted with hardpoints on one side?

- I'm also wondering why some of the components do not have a consistent placement of hardpoints: there's a long cylindrical component for example that only has hardpoints on about half the component; This drastically reduces it's usefulness as a base component for creating some more unusual ships.

I'm wondering if something could be added where you could shift between hardpoints on or very near a particular plane, using the arrow keys (or something like that).  That would help a ton when you're struggling to get a component to attach itself to the correct side of a ship, and when it finally does you could more smoothly add it to the desired spot on the hull.  Maybe this would toggle on when you hold alt so it only does the horizontal plane, or vertical with shift.

It would also be helpful if the copy and move functions were more clear, I'm having issues finding them.  Also certain buttons are really hard to select (trying to change scale of an object causes it to deselect because the mouse missed the exact spot on the slider/number box.

At any rate I'm very impressed with the first edition of this, even if getting components to go on the desired spot is annoying, the current level of customizability is great.  :)