Ship Design Problems

There's definitely a little polish that could help with the ship designer. I love it though. So awesome.

My two main things I'd love to see are:

Just ignore the hardpoint rotations in the list, I don't see a reason to keep track of them.
Have it so that after you attach an item, you can resize & rotate them.

Those two things would make me really happy.

I just noticed that bug tonight, where deleted items remain in the lower icon list. I was upgrading (changing) a pre-existing design. I can only reliably delete things by clicking in the 3D screen, then hitting delete, instead of clicking the icon and then delete.

There is also a weird bug where clicking Upgrade for an existing ship would show the model as matte white, with no texture map. To clear it, I had to select Done with no save, then click Upgrade again, and the normal texture mapping was there. This is with the latest 1.0X path, btw.

Also, I guess this isn't exactly a bug, but if I jump into a game just to fool with the ship designer, I have to remember to save the actual game, and not just exit, otherwise the designs disappear even though you've clicked "Save" inside the ship editor. i lost a couple of minor designs that way, and it's not exactly intuitive. There should maybe be some kind of safeguard here, so the game reminds you to save if you've created new designs and then try to exit the game.

To keep my designs organized, I've been naming each main design "Name 0" with the zero indicating a prototype version. I don't put any components on these. The zero makes sure it comes up first in the list, so a light fighter prototype would be "Scorpion 0". When I add components in the course of a game, I save out the following numbered versions. After a game I usually delete most of the saved designs past the prototype, unless I come up with something especially useful that I think I might want to use in a later game.

Here's one with the shipyard,

Whenever I upgrade one of my custom ships to add newer components, often times the new design is added to my list instead of replacing the previous version. So, I end up with a bout 20 designs of the same ship with my starports all randomly building one of these versions.

Yes, it's annoying.

I've come across those issues as well. Also I've got a couple of my own.

- There are times where it is very difficult to select the hardpoint you want for placing an item. This occurs mostly on parts with a large number of them or a part that is made smaller then the *ideal* size. Some way of highlighting which hardpoint I'm working on would be nice.

- Ship designs should be sub foldered based on the race they are created for. If I decide to remove a custom race it should take out all the designs for that race.

- Some way of maintaining the designs outside of the shipyard would be great or at least a way to see what has been designed already even if I don't have the techs to build it yet. I wouldn't be surprised if in the next month or so we don't see a user created tool for managing our designs.

This thing is a great feature. One of the best things added to the genre in a very long time. I'm sure they'll continue to make improvements to it as they stamp out all the *gameplay* bugs