I spent a couple of hours messing around with the ship editor (see photos below!). I've spent more hours than I probably should in the GalCiv2 ship builder, but that was a long time ago and I've probably forgotten a few things. Here's some first impressions that I had after successfully assembling a ship:
- I absolutely love the option to scale a part with different scaling in different directions. This makes every part so much more versatile. I look forwards to seeing (and making) new ship designs with this ability.
- The option to offset is great. The control this gives over the location of parts is very much appreciated.
- The mirror option is also very nice to produce symmetry without a great deal of effort.
- I remember in GalCiv2 that different parts had vastly different texture resolution, especially with scaling. If I tried to put a 'large' part that was scaled down and a 'small' part that was scaled up on the same ship, these differences were very apparent. I did not notice this happening in the GalCiv3 ship builder.
- I would really like to see 3 dimensional axis on the screen so I know which way a part will move or rotate. I click to move a part on the y axis, and realize I really wanted it to move on the x axis. This would not be such a problem, except...
- I constantly lost the ability to click on the offset arrows, the rotation/offset/etc tab, and the associated numerals. Instead, it seemed to click on the background and I lost selection on the part I was manipulating. This happened again and again.
- Selecting parts already on the ship is easy. I know it's easy, you just click the part along the bottom of the screen. I foresee a problem, though, once I've used 10 of a certain part on a ship. Sometimes, it's very difficult to click the part you want when you have multiple overlapping parts. One solution might be to cycle through overlapping/nearby parts with use of the tab key. I have no idea how hard this would be to implement, but it would help in more complicated designs.
- Keyboard commands for offset and rotation of parts would be very welcome. WASD (x axis and y axis), and RF (z axis) perhaps? Maybe hold shift for free rotation of the part?
- I'd like the ability to group parts and copy/paste the entire group. I'd like to make a wing with associated details out of 5 parts, then copy them to multiple spots on a ship, or multiple ships. Once I've got the orientation and scaling I want, I'd like to avoid having to do it again. Maybe some sort of block editor? Maybe this is beyond what the editor is intended to do, or would take too long to design and code.
- All in all I'm very impressed with the ship builder so far!
- I also didn't realize that I was opening a background creator! The 3rd pic below is my new background! A 'hide interface button' would be great for taking full sized screenshots.
