Initial Feedback on the ship designer

I thought I’d write up my initial feedback on the ship designer and post it before reading anything else here as I don’t want to be biased by other people’s opinions at this stage. Sorry if this sounds harsh, I love the ship designer but think there is room for improvement.

Bugs:

(1)  Animation, when setting parts to rotate with oscillate rather than complete rotation they seemed sometimes to be translated away from the main body e.g. moved away in front of the ships main body before starting to rotate.

(2)  When clicking between Tabs to position pieces e.g. Rotate, translate and offset the widget vanishes and I have to reselect the piece to get it back it’s almost like it has my pointer position wrong and thinks I’m clicking on blank space.

Things I like:

(1)  Being able to offset parts is a good design tool which helps also to compensate for issues with hard points (see my later suggestions).

(2)  Being able to scale parts along different axis rather than just proportional scaling.

(3)  The symmetry options are very useful.

(4)  Options to group or ungroup though I haven’t tried them.

(5)  Some of the options that are hinted at but not implemented yet like particle effects.

Things I don’t like and Suggestions:

Two big things here the UI and the Hard point system, then a few minor niggles; let’s talk UI first:

The controls used to rotate, scale and offset pieces aren’t very good just like in GC2 they are hard to use accurately, also in this case they are rather small and the default snaps and steps large particularly for rotation.I think you should look to implement context sensitive widgets that show attached to the piece and keyboard short cuts in a similar way to 3D modelling programs. Look at their UI’s for inspiration.

The animation controls are a little awkward too, how about letting me setup an oscillation along an axis by rotating or translating the piece to the start and end positions and then clicking a button to mark those Key positions.

Also snap to sizes except for rotation should be adjusted to suite different sized ships, depending on what I’m designing it should be proportional.

Lastly scaling of parts; if I’m creating a tiny hull and choose to add a large ship part can the system please automatically scale it down to a reasonable size for a tiny ship when I select it please. I almost always have to start by scaling down the massive part that swamps the ship I’ve been designing.

Hard points, why are these needed they are fiddly to hit sometimes when trying to place a piece particularly in models with lots of over lapping parts, I like that you now have the option to change their density though if you must have them. Why not simply have a 3D grid with 0,0,0 at its centre clearly marked and let people freely arrange parts on it  (while keeping snap to grid concept with an adjustable snap)?

I guess what I’m asking is are hard points actually needed at all or are they a legacy of how the GC2 ship designer evolved from a system originally designed just to let people attach a limited amount of components to a predesigned hull? If so it may be time for you to rethink. This would also do away with needing a starter piece for the hull, which I find often just gets in the way of the design think GC2 had an invisible cube if I remember correctly.

Texturing, I know there might be some stuff here we haven’t seen yet but how about supporting retexturing of parts with imported textures, and how about even having a procedural texturing options allowing for users to adjust properties of some defined procedural textures?