Ship Creator improvement checklist

Or a more pleasant way for me to whine

from StarControl Forums

This is a collection of things that I believe would improve the enjoyment of the ship creation process.

  1. Being able to flip parts before placing them

  2. As an extension of Number 1: Being able to switch which hardpoint you'd like the part to be placed as.
    (One example is that there's a wing in the part list where its hardpoint is exactly the opposite of the logical placement)
    EXAMPLE_01 | EXAMPLE_02

  3. Editable textboxes for each slider to give more fine control of post-part placement.
    (If I could have set the slider to any value between 2 and 3% this saucer would have lined up perfectly)
    EXAMPLE_01

  4. Individually colorable parts. Meaning I can select a part and change just that part's color.

  5. Labeling for all of the parts and mount-points.
    I had to place all of the mount-points on a sphere just to figure out what was what. That is way far into unintuitive.

  6. Re-sizable and/or Hide-able weapons, engines, and thrusters.
    I was creating what amounted to be a Black Spathi starship only to find out the weapon, engine, and thruster pods are fricken huge
    This looks ridiculous:  EXAMPLE_01

  7. Being able to change the direction a weapon is fired.
    Right now we can change which direction a weapon is faced but it does nothing about the direction in which it is fired.

  8. An arrow or visual to show the ships forward direction.
    Nothing sucks more than having to reconfigure an entire ship just because you accidentally built it backwards.

  9. Add ability to change textures

  10. (Wishful thinking) Add a minimalist 3D mesh editor to create your own parts

  11. Add ability to take a snapshot of your own ship icon.
    At this moment the automatic one is a bit drunk and gives me garbled icons: EXAMPLE_01
    I had some success creating my own icon using Photoshop and replacing the garbled one in the Designs directory: EXAMPLE_02

  12. Add ability to change engine, thruster, and weapon sound effects

  13. Add ability to adjust the size and length of ion trail.
    Even to the point of hiding it, but not making it so long you could play a game of Snake

 

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Reply #1 from StarControl Forums Top

Thanks for the hard works on SCO. For ship creator improvements, I totally agree with Serosis. Here are some of my ideas:

1. Ship creator in Galactic Civilizations 3 is great. Can’t we have something similar to that in SCO?

2. In both GC3 and SCO, holding mid mouse button to rotate and holding left mouse button to move. However, after I released the mouse button, the model continues to move or rotate. PLEASE make the model motion STOP as soon as the player releases the button.

3. Hopefully it’s possible to add more detail settings for individual parts: 

   [a] detail color settings

   [b] texture 

   [c] animation (like GC3) 

   [d] special effects (lightning, pulse waves, fire…,etc ) 

   [e] specify weapon or thruster firing point/area 

As for the thruster parts, it would be great to allow players to set the appearance of thrust under specific conditions (EX: always off, left thruster triggered by right turn…. )

 

4. To make editing more efficient, add some functions would be great!

   [a] Mirror part 

   [b] Offset

   [c] Properties copy: copy the settings of a part and paste into another.

   [d] Set group of parts

 

5. In Star Craft, there are some crystal or diamond look parts. Can we have some them in SCO?

 

6. As for ship explosion animation, it would be great to have different explosion styles.

   [a] Small ship: something like SC2, simple and quick.

   [b] Medium ship: the one currently using.

   [c] big ship: first, light glows out, come with some small explosions and finally a big bang. 

   [d] Bio ship: for the Pinthi ships.

 

7. In further update, can we edit ships like Pinthi?