Some ship designer questions

from GalCiv2 Forums

I recently upgraded to Windows 7 and in the process, rediscovered (and re-installed)  GalCiv 2. I'm really enjoying playing it again, but this time around I'm trying out some other things in the game. In particular I'm spending some more time with the ship builder trying to make ships for a custom race I'm playing. Previously I'd just slap some new tech on a hull and call it a fleet. Now I'm trying for aesthetics.

Long story short, I think either my reach exceeds my grasp in terms of design, or I don't understand the limitations of the designer, or both. so I have a couple of questions.

First off you should know I'm playing The ultimate edition v2.02 (I haven't gotten Impulse to work in Windows 7 yet - so no upgrade)

1) can you change the point of attachment for the attaching piece  - say, if I wanted to attach a new piece to the main section but attach it off center.  when you attach a piece, most components seem to have a default place they attach (usually the center) I'm wondering if you could cycle the point of attachment of the incoming piece. I don't see a way to do this in the interface - perhaps there's some hot keys I don't know about.

What I'm trying to achieve is a rather spidery, delicate look, which calls for some long spans connecting various things. an example might be the Torian space miner with it's two long parallel sections. 

2) are there things about the core design templates that can't be replicated in a build from scratch model. an example - I deconstructed an Altarian star fury to see how it was made (i.e. what components) and got down to the little box thing, then I started over to try and duplicate it as an excercise. so I select  the Tiny Hull and proceed to try and attach the cockpit piece to the box - after rotating it I stick it on the cube only to find it won't center. now , perhaps I'm not selecting the correct attachment point - the cube is densely covered in attachement points after all, but it seems like the Core designs behave slightly differently. I guess I can just modify a core design and save it as something else, but I'd like to know if I'm just having trouble finding the correct attachment point. perhaps there's a trick to it that I don't know.

3) is there a way to make all of these designs I plan to make available for custom races?  

4) while I've learned a lot de-constructing the core designs, I wondered if anyone knows a current  tutorial on getting the most out of the ship builder. 

5) I correct in thinking that I have access to all the components in the designer and that the "your style" tab just has a rotating subset of components allowing you to get a consistent look for a civ. in other words I'm not actually missing any jewelry if I'm designing for the Altarians but wanted something a little more aggressive looking like a Drath design. I would just have to look in the "other" tab, correct?

6) finally, I went looking for some extras in the library, and got a little confused. If I'm looking for jewelry should I be looking for just components, or do some of the ship models contain jewelry as well? (or are they just hulls) or should I be looking at things like the Babylon5 mod to contain jewelry as well. I'm not really familiar with Mods for this game and wouldn't want to miss something fun to add to the ship designer.

Thanks for taking the time to read this. I know none of this is Earth-shakingly  important, but any help or advice would be appreciated.

3,405 views 3 replies
Reply #1 from GalCiv2 Forums Top

 

1-- The point on a part where it anchors to its parent part is based on the 0/0/0 coordinate of the model itself. However my mod does provide invisible extensions which can be used to "move" a hardpoint a scaleable distance in any direction and possible achieve the visual effect you're going for.

 

2-- Any of the core templates should be able to be reproduced in the game, since that's where they were made. There may be some "trick" part placement involved though, so it's mostly a matter of very carefully examining the relationships of the parts when you disassemble it.

 

3-- If you pick the same hull style when building that race, all designs made under that hull style should be available.

 

5-- Correct, though you won't have access to the hull models themselves. KHSM (linked above) allows you to create ships from scratch (starting only with a hardpoint floating in space) and provides all of the hull models, plus others like asteroids, as jewelry pieces.

 

6-- Most ship mods you'll find are either packages of designs made in the designer, or just base hull models from various other franchises and soures. There are only a handful that add new jewelry bits or otherwise provide greater customization within the existing framework.

 

Reply #2 from GalCiv2 Forums Top

Thanks for the quick reply.

I'll download your Mod and try it out tonight. Undoubtedly, I'll be back with questions :)  

I noticed something when I was trying to replicate parts of the altarian star fury core design mentioned in 2) above. when I deconstructed the core design, modified it to suit my needs, and tried to save it as a different named template, it overwrote a previous user template replacing the text but not the model (i.e. the old model still displayed in the designer but with a new name)  did I run up against some sort of protection for core designs?

Again refering to the Altarian version of the Star Fury,  I was mostly interested in cockpit portion of that model to use as a basis for tiny fighters. with that in mind, I selected the tiny hull hard point (i assume that's what the little cube that's not an actual hull is) and the cockpit piece. through trial and error I was able to attach and rotate it into the position I wanted. when I tried to attach a hull-looking piece behind it, there was a noticable  gap between it and the cockpit area. I solved this by scaling another piece over the gap, but I wondered if this is the sort of problem your mod would solve?

Another question that came up as I was playing with the designer.

is there a way to select multiple components at once? I put a bunch of "wings" on a design and decided they were all too big. clicking on each one and resizing them is fine, but since you have to eyeball the scale slider, I wanted a way to make sure I'm making all the pieces the same size. 

 

thanks again for taking the time to answer my questions.

 

 

 

Ashes of the Singularity II
Reply #3 from GalCiv2 Forums Top

What I'm trying to achieve is a rather spidery, delicate look, which calls for some long spans connecting various things. an example might be the Torian space miner with it's two long parallel sections.
End of quote

Please post some pictures because you really have got my attention.

I give you a well balanced High Tech Construction Ship, the ASC-Vo-Ant-H -. It has 4 Stellar Folder Drives that has base speed of 25/week, 5 Ultra Life Supports that has a cap range of 10.3 Pc, 6 Sensors Arrays that has a radius cap range of 15 and 1 Constructor Module for building bases.

ASC-Vo-Ant-H-

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The absence of faith is the mark of the heretic.

The absence of faith is the mark of damnation.

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