Ship creator Suggestions

One thing you should allow is for the player to see the weapons they have chosen for a ship during edit mode. It can be a bit annoying to have to go into weapon select mode and see how the ship looks with the weapons and keep on making small adjustments until it is correct. 

Just tried the Ship Editor today. 

Things I liked:

• Lots of cool looking ship parts
• The pieces look good when they connect.
• Primary/ secondary colors.  Even if you add an option to color individual pieces, it would still be nice to have this option for quick coloring.
• Once I was in the outfit screen, it was easy to select a primary and secondary weapon.

Things that really need improvement:

• It felt really hard to control the rotation.  Only way I could see to rotate and zoom was to hold my middle mouse button down and move the mouse, but that made the screen spin rapidly.  I'd like to see some keyboard buttons for rotate right /  left.  Also I don't need to zoom way out and lose sight of the ship, and I don't see the point of having a nebula cloud.  There needs to be a "reset view" button, to restore the camera to an nice original default.
• Whenever I tried to save the ship, it said I need to add a weapon mount.  But I added every type of mount, and I still couldn't save.  I ended up only being able to make something by editing an existing ship.
• I want to be able to hit "escape" and revert the cursor back to default selector when I have a piece selected.
• Tooltips!  I want to see a tooltip when I hover over a mount to explain what it is.  The tooltip doesn't have to be by the cursor as that might get in the way, it can be at the bottom of the box.
• When I select or hover over a weapon or engine or thrust, I want the stats and details.  I want the ships stats to be shown in the outfit screen and change as I make my selections.  I want the total points for the ship to be shown

Speaking of control, please allow for entering number of transformations, rotations, and scales. When you want to make very precise transformations, rotations, or scales, it can be very tedious to change the bar until you get the exact right number you want.

- I would really like to be able to scale X, Y, and Z axes separately, to be able to make something thicker or narrower without also making it taller, and so on.

- I would like X, Y, and Z indicators that show which was is forward, at the very least. I have only done it occasionally, but sometimes I've got a ship pointed in the wrong direction and it flies backward in the Fleet Battles. (I'd probably rotated the view, decided I didn't like what I had, deleted everything, started with a part that has no obvious front, and...oops. No amount of rotating the base seems to change which way is forward, either. Very frustrating.)

- I would like the engines and thrusters to not actually have their own geometry, and for the mounted engine to not leave trails. The ship parts that resemble engines already leave trails, so the new engine is just extra. 

Further, both engine and thruster geometry is often far too large to conceal if we only want the ship geometry to represent the engines, for example. At the very least, the size of the mount should change the size of what gets mounted. (Weapons don't show up on their mounts, for example.) Or, have ship parts not generate trails, but allow us to have as many engine mounts as we want, placed anywhere we want. It'd be purely aesthetic; the engine would still have the same power/speed.

- I must second the need for the weapon mounts' directions to determine the direction of fire. But, with that in mind, we might need to have a way to make them fire in a symmetrical manner. For example, if we put a weapon mount facing sideways, we might want to have the same on the other side so we don't always have to face the same direction relative to our target.

This, of course, presents energy-consumption problems; if we're allowed multiple weapon mounts, that might give us too much power. Possible solution: for each weapon mount, firing takes more energy, thus limiting the amount of extra damage that might be done by limiting the rate of fire.

- Cut-and-paste options and/or automatic symmetry. Sometimes, getting a ship part into the right position at the right scale and rotation can be a gigantic pain...and then, if we want the exact same thing on the other side of the ship, we now have to memorize or write down the parameters from the original (or constantly re-select it and memorize a few of the settings) in order to get the other part to conform. Giant pain in the butt.

- Alien-builder. (This one is a bit of a pie-in-the-sky wish, I realize.) The other ships have animated pilots, but our custom ships have some weird-lookin' squidgy thing that isn't animated. I'd like to be able to build my own alien species to fly the ship. Like the creature builder from Spore, only less cartoony.

I can probably think of more if I try, but those are what come to my brain now...

Something else I'd like to see: retro rockets. The ability to slow yourself without having to turn around, or at least thrust backward relative to the ship's direction.

Obviously, there aren't slots in the Engine and Thrusters categories, so imagine these as, say, a secondary weapon. 

Another thing that would be nice: an eye-dropper tool.

Just so that we don't have to 100% replicate an already-placed, already designed part by hand; copy all of its offset and rotation stats aall set and ready for placement on, say, the opposite side of the ship.

This would make symmetry tons easier.