Galactic Civilizations: Ship Designer

Hours spent playing GCII and GCIII    Too many to count..

Hours of that time actually spent designing ships...     also way too many to count.

The ship designer is not needed to make these games fun to play... but they are some one engrossing way to make me forget how fast time does indeed pass when having fun.

Being able to make your own ships adds hugely to the fun factor of GC III, as it did for GC II.

Now in III having all this with fine hires textures and way more detailed components it's just glorious

I fully agree the GC series would be great games without the ship designer, but IMO having them adds immensely to the "longevity" of those games since you can always create something new...

The ship designer IS the game. That said, there are problems:

1) In GC2, a hardpoint had a set orientation, in GC3, they have a sort-of orientation, but the X-Y-Z axes of the component are absolute (they align with the ship's axes) not relative (the part's axes). And the program gets confused (as do I). This means that sometimes a piece cannot be rotated in one direction (two 'axes' are now parallel). It also means that arranging parts around, say, a circle is very hard, because you need to use geometry to figure out the offsets. Worse, they won't animate properly because sometimes their internal axis crosses two absolute axes. Also, sometimes the axes upnpredictably come out to 45 degrees off of the main axis. 

2) Some parts have really unfortunate choices of axes, making them hard to use.

3) Sometimes the incremental "offset" values change when you click on another component. You have to enter the value by hand and hit return to make the value come out right.

4) Like above, some angles are unreachable... the angle-ometer will come close to the correct angle, but will stop a few decimal places short. Sometimes even hand-entering the angle won't help.

5) Custom components are hard to make, impossible to organize, and they mess up scaling (especially their own, but they can mess up the scaling of other parts too).

6) You can't change ship size if you mess up.

7) Many parts have lights, which limits their utility if you want them a different size or for a race that can't see visible light. many parts have engines that would be nice to have go away. Sometimes the windows use engine lights and the engines use window lights. It would be nice to just be able to turn off engine or window lights.

8) There isn't enough light in the designer to see your creation, and you can't change light direction or fill light (of which there is none)

9) The designer can't be launched without a concurrent game.

10) You cannot turn a ship all the way around or zoom in and out all the way (zooming into a ship is useful) like you could in GC2.

11) Every [expletive deleted] Yor part is assymetrical.

Ok, enough. I love the designer. I spend all day in it. keep up the great work!

About 3) It's not sometimes - it's all the time. The value you input with the mouse wheel is always 0.1 less then what is displayed. With the exception of any round number, like 1.0, 2.0, 3.0 and etc.

12) Some parts have not properly aligned hard-points.

13) You can never attach part to hard-point you want if there a one or more hard-points behind the one you chose (from you angle of view). You have to find right angle to do it - if it even possible. Ship designer is a good tool to find out how much actual patience you have... and i have a lot  

Any particular reason why medium and large ships are about the same size in the battle viewer?  I'd expect large to be at least twice as long as medium.

I would re-ask this as a separate issue, titled "sizes in the viewer." I think they made Large hulls larger, but didn't change the scale factor...

I have to say I LOVE the designer. I spend a lot of time in it, and really enjoy working with it. But I agree, there are some finicky things about it.

In fact, I got on the forum specifically to post about the designer, and I saw this thread. How fortuitous!

As much as I love the designer, I would greatly appreciate if the dev team could apply a little polish to it. 

General Pants and El_Borrak, good list.

About 5) Parts resizing from the editor to the game can make a ton of time and effort making (what the designer obviously believes is) an awesome design turn into a hot mess and results in a great deal of subsequent frustration and redesigning. This particular issue has recently (last night) thrown me into fits of hysteria and rage (okay, not really, but I was quite frustrated). I did a quick search and found that it has been an issue for a long time (known since at least Nov. of 2015; see posts here and here)... The linked forum posts have pictures, but for those who don't want to click out of this thread, here are some of my own to demonstrate:

While editing, the ship looks like this:

In the game (designer/shipyard/map), the ship looks like this:

Again, I love the designer. It is an amazing tool--just as the OP demonstrates. But "for the serious designer," to whom the post refers, a few fixes could make this all the more amazing! Thanks again to the dev team for all their hard work making an awesome game! Looking forward to many more hundreds of hours of enjoyment!

I love the ship designer like I love lego. One thing I would like to see improved in the future selection of colours, shades, etc. Perhaps having more more materials and an RGB wheel?

Given that the designer is a genuine standout feature for the game it makes it even more of a shame that over the last 2 years that so little has been done to make the experience better.

missing from GC2, you made great improvements to the designer but have left out some of the basic features that were important.

• the quick orientation views
• Ambient lighting slider
• color selection
•  top down view
• quick toggle for hard point display
• auto rotating view

next time I'm in it I'm sure I'll find more

Omnibus is so discouraged that he posted this to me with the ok to share it. Please please listen to us.

Omnibus: Havent put it on and doubt I will for some time yet. Might have al look at their new crusade or whatever it is. But unless they have fixed or done something to the Ship limit and even added a delete in the exported (created) Parts then they can go to buggery. I have asked and asked, seems like they have just thrown it in the too hard or cant be stuffed basket. Then come out with, you the players have asked for thing crap, which I havent seen or heard of, but heard and asked for Colour set but again, ignored. Just ppeeved with the whole attitude

Quick toggle for hard point is the space bar.

But all the rest is valid points.

One more thing that i just remembered - ability to detach part and move it to some other hard-point, without deleting and going through entire list to find it again. 

In GC2 if you added a part, later you decided to add more like it.  You could select the part on the ship then reselect it in the list and it would keep the settings that you used before. This was really useful for adding the part to new sections of your ship.

And none of us remembered that in GCII you could favorite a part. That would be so useful for making ship sets!

Direct hit. Fire for effect!

but that only lasted for that game, persistent would have been better.

Hey there! I have a few questions/thoughts.

1) While I greatly appreciate that there are fixes and additions that could be made to the ship designer, I will disagree with many here, in that I think it is and should be, a low priority. Games like Spore for example, focused too much on their creative generator and not enough on gameplay... I've spent just shy of 1500 hours in GC3 and I've never finished a game properly, and I doubt even 100 hours is actual game play. So while, it would make MY life much better if the designer was improved, I think it wiser for SD to focus on content that the majority will enjoy, not just the shipyard junkies. The Civ editor is far more important to making the Ship editor more relevant than ever before.

2) I will however gripe about one thing... the ship parts in the Rise of the Terrans DLC are so badly textured that I find them completely unusable. I get that they are a rip from the old game, but seriously textures matter. The various "material" differences between the ship styles, isn't totally helpful, but these are egregious.

3) And if we are going to work on the designer, instead of adding features, it would be better if: 1) It was optimized better, a ship in the designer is laggier than in game BY FAR, and 2) Fix the "no visible scaling" issue, where a part, attached to a custom part, does not visible change scale, but will outside the designer. It makes it very difficult to create intricate designs that require numerous custom parts at certain scales.

Thanks for reading.

Yes, perhaps "the ship designer is the game" was a bit hyperbolic. And Stardock does need to focus on what will get the most buys. However, they WERE advertising the designer, so it seemed an appropriate time to reconsider some of the persistent problems in their well-advertised feature. I would be happier if they addressed just one or two of these problems at some point (lighting, perhaps, maybe an 'edit' button).

I would agree that the ship designer is less important than the base game, but it's still a vital part of what separates the galciv games from other 4x games.  If GCIII did not have the ship designer, I doubt I would have bought the game.

I absolutely love the Ship Designer.  Don't get me wrong, my thousands of hours are mostly dedicated to managing empires or killing enemies or both, but I love the Designer.

I do not do "conventional" designs.  I do off the wall things that convince me that they are not anything humans would build or that tickle some part of my funny bone, or most importantly, somehow leverage the animation portion of the Ship Designer.  There are numbers buried in those animation settings!  I am not an artist, but I am clever with numbers, so some of my designs are quite original and unique.  Most importantly, even though they take tons of fiddling and rethinking about values and relationships, they are fun for me.

My highest praise goes to the texturing.  I am almost always completely satisfied by the way two parts of a style match up no matter how you connect them.  It looks like it was built that way on purpose, even if you don't know what the purpose is.  That is an important illusion for standard designs and really helps my wilder ones.  That it can work with so many physical placement variations amazes me every time.  Even non-matching styles can be made to convincingly merge and do the "It's supposed to look this way." illusion.  Nice.  Thanks go to the Ship Designer designers.

Next goes for the number of variables in the design tools.  Offsets are great.   I don't always understand what is going on with Symmetry and my animations, but when they do work out, it is perfect for synchronizing things.  The different animation motion choices are, of course, the key feature for me.  I am still trying to figure what to do with animated scaling.  What I have found so far is pretty wild, even for me.  It is there in those animation settings I get the most satisfaction and the most frustration, all at once.  We are all obsessive here, but we obsess over so many different things. 

Now for the frustrations:

I cannot believe there is still no cute stylized 3D compass rose marked Forward, Aft, Port, Starboard, Above, Below.  That it is not there in a corner spinning around to match the way I have spun my ship model mystifies me.  With each patch and release I look in the corner for it, but it is not there.  If someone can explain why it is not there, I would love to hear that.  I know it has been mentioned before on the forums, and if you devs claim to be listening to us, this is not evidence that you are doing so.  I am still disappointed it was not part of the original plans.  There is not much about the game I would say that about, but that is a horrible gaff in my opinion.  A similar one is the scaling issue.  I have a Medium hull that almost spills out of its hex tile on the map.  I have no idea how to fix that and I do not appreciate that the designer did not give me some clue about it before I put all my work in. 

I have lost many ship designs because I forgot to save the test file game I was using to design the ship.  I still don't understand if I should save as template or save as ship or what the difference really is.  I get confused about the custom parts function, and it doesn't seem to like saving animation definitions.  The busy work of ship designing could use some streamlining or something.  I generate tons of interim files during my designing and cleaning them out is not really an in game function.  And I still haven't heard why the Ship Designer can't be accessed from the main menu. 

When I get down to the details of the animation settings, I do not understand many of the decisions made there.  One is granularity.  I can adjust Rotation in integer steps from -180 to +180.  That is a lot of freedom of choice.  But it is not as much freedom of choice as implied by putting a decimal place in the display.  As far as I can tell, there is no way to utilize that decimal place.  I don't know why it is there.  I would love for it to be meaningful, but I doubt a lot of other people would notice.  Either make it do something or get rid of it as an empty promise.  When I go to Lateral motion I get a range of choices from -10 to +10.  Why is that?  Is lateral motion somehow different to code?  And again there are decimals there that should help my nitpicky obsession, but they don't do anything.  I type them in as values and it looks like it takes it, but it is a temporary illusion and does nothing.

In each of the animation screens there is a function called Oscillate.  It is a wonderful idea and very useful.  Setting it up is a fiddly mouse movement pain.  If I need two parts to move the same distance, I have to set the two arrows exactly the same on both.  Neither arrow lets me set the value precisely with the scroll wheel.  And in the Lateral movement settings, I suddenly have functioning decimal places!  Yay!  However, it has its own ideas about how I can use those decimals and will jump from 3.2 to 3.6 or some other interval.  But I cannot enter numerical values and the scroll wheel does not slide the arrows, so I end up trying multiple times to move my mouse just one pixel and get this part to 3.2 just like I got the other part.  That takes a lot of the fun out of the process.

I could use a button that resets the animation to start point and pauses.  Otherwise, adding parts becomes a nightmare.  The present pause button can leave parts in positions where the hardpoints are not where the part is visually at the moment.  You get unidentifiable hardpoints floating in space. 

I could really use a phase control function to synchronize or de-synchonize two matching rotations.  I consider that a request for a very limited usage base but having one object pointing forward while the others are pointing starboard is a problem.  You can often fix it with a quick static rotation in the Edit function, but in any compound set of rotations, a simple phase adjust, even of 90 degree steps, would be a big help.

And I want blinking and dimming animation for glowing parts, pretty please.

And I want to end on a high note.  The Ship Designer can be very interesting if you let someone young coach you as you design.  "It needs more glowy things!  Make the top part spin real fast!"  "I want one of those!"  Fun.

I agree with this--and this overall premise. I would actually prefer not to see any added features, at least not until the handful of features at issue work as intended and are better optimized.

Would it be an outrageous idea to make it much easier to swap hull sizes? Since every size can use the same modules, why not simply make it so that you can design any ship you wish, but determine the relevant hull size finally only when saving (so you could also change it when saving again).

That way we would never get into trouble when we realize that design X would be much better in another hull size...Of course in an ongoing game you would still only be able to build ships using sizes that have been researched.

Proposed many times on many threads. There is a work-around, but it is time-consuming. I am hoping they will fix this in Crusade!

I find looking at other people's work challenging and good for this. I'm gotten some good coaching on here, although you do have to decide ultimately for yourself. I personally have to work a lot with computer limitations. And imagination limitations...

I will wholeheartedly agree to this, and add to it. Please make the designer work like it is supposed to, then make it work like the one in GC2, then add new options.

Agree its a low priority.

I like the sound of several features suggested here.

Another I'd like, and I've asked for this before, is a toggle function that can cycle the attachment of a selected part through the hardpoints on the part it's attached to.