GalCiv2: Custom starships

[El Moose Monstero]

In here rather than AMP as the thread's audience is probably limited and is probably more likely to get traffic here than there, but I leave it to higher powers to bump it up if it actually goes anywhere.

In this thread, post your custom or knock-off-from-science-fiction starships made using the ship editor from Galactic Civilisations 2 - I remember a few people discussing their custom fleets, and I spent a good hour and a half last night making ships for the fun of it. Am pretty chuffed with my ISD, something quite satisfying about seeing a dozen drath frigates going down to its weapons array. Will post mine later when I'm in front of the relevant PC to get screencaps. Been going through an imperial theme of late, since they included the saucer, star trek designs became a little too easy to do!

Hell knows how I'm going to do the Executor when I get up to massive capital ships.

[El Moose Monstero]

Now with lazily cut and pasted images...

[Oskuro]

I like those ISDs. My efforts were mainly to create Borg ships and mix them with community-made ST ships (I was thinking of making a mod to give Borg style to the Dread Lords). It's amazing how not-so-easy it is to come up with a decent cube in the editor. And they all lag the game like hell. I'll see if I can dig them up.

[El Moose Monstero]

I like those ISDs. My efforts were mainly to create Borg ships and mix them with community-made ST ships (I was thinking of making a mod to give Borg style to the Dread Lords). It's amazing how not-so-easy it is to come up with a decent cube in the editor. And they all lag the game like hell. I'll see if I can dig them up.

The editor really needs a few more buttons - I'd quite like an angle editor, so you can put a numerical value in for your angle instead - it's really irritating trying to make a large ship panel and then find that the angle was slightly off and the panel has started to bend off into infinity. I'd also quite like a clone or copy button, rather than have to make one half of a ship then try to repeat it exactly on the other side.

I didn't realise there was lag on these things, I guess it stands to reason, I suppose I'm finally seeing the benefit of my computer of death.

[Darth Onasi]

Some of these use parts mods, and are mostly original except for the Star Trek-y one and one based on Pioneer II from Phantasy Star Online.

[Brother-Captain Gaius]

Question - with the basic cube 'blank slate' style hull, how do you determine scale? There is no frame of reference for how big the starting cube is, which makes it extremely difficult to tell if I'm scaling the do-dads correctly for a ship of a given size.

[El Moose Monstero]

Question - with the basic cube 'blank slate' style hull, how do you determine scale? There is no frame of reference for how big the starting cube is, which makes it extremely difficult to tell if I'm scaling the do-dads correctly for a ship of a given size.

Not sure, you could try just making a cube ship, just with the blank hull, then doing the info thing on it, that'll tell you the length of each different hull cube, then work from there?

[Stark]

LOL GOOD QUESTION. You pretty much have to pick a size-scale for your whole fleet and make sure the major structural elements of the fleet use this size setting manually. In my Cyberfleet, I had to jimmy with the large-size one because it looked fine, but was only slightly larger than the medium ship I made due to wildly differing scales. Luckily, being zeppelins, they were build on a spine-and-hub arrangment so I could scale them up very easily, but on more complex ships it's complete bullshit.

And Monstero, the editor needs HEAPS of better options for fine-tuning positioning and mirroring or aligning structures. They also need to FUCKING put the hardpoints in the FUCKING centre of the FUCKING parts instead of in FUCKING RANDOM OFF TO ONE SIDE positions. Many parts are not mirrorable, as the mountpoint is in a strange place, and even some of the hardpoints along other parts are often not mirrored either. It's been years and three paid addons and they've never fixed it because they're fucking retarded.

[Oskuro]

They didn't fix it because they created those parts with those attachment points in mind, wich of course makes the viable options for many of the parts rather scarce. They could have made so you could select between different attachment points in a given part... but of course they could have done a bunch of improvements in every area. I'm happy that they made the editor at all, they could have just given us stock 3D models with hardpoints for the weapons, and nothing else.

And yes, the thing can lag, as more complex ships are massive polygon-fests. I like to use the squarish borg looking pannel, to make the sides of my ships look more interesting, but they are quite the resource hog, specially during crowded battles.

[Stark]

Oh I know that, but people have hated it since the game first came out ages ago because it makes symmetry A PAIN IN THE ASS. When you attach a number of features to a central point and they're all slightly off-centre because Brad Wardell is a fucking cretin, you have to fuck around with very complex structures to make the symmetry sit right.

Every time I work inside one of the cyber-zeppelins I have to look at the complex wheel-and-spoke arrangement I had to develop to make the structure actually centred, and it's impossible to have some other features share the same central axis because the hardpoints are never in the centre of something, so you're bolting the SIDE of a rotating hub to the SIDE of the central spine and wondering why it doesn't fucking rotate properly.

I really dig the editor and you can do really cool shit with it, but they added so much functionality and never took the time to fix the fucking pieces and it annoys the shit out of me, just like all the other inexcusable oversights (like holy shit the 'custom ship style' thumbnail showing a ship from the ORIGINAL STYLE and NOT THE CUSTOM ONE AT ALL thus making it TOTALLY FUCKING USELESS THANKS BRAD).