First 1.1 Screenshots out

very nice

Pwahaha! I can't wait to conquer the galaxy in my Picasso-esque ships. They'll win because enemy ships won't have any idea where the lasers are shooting from.

I wonder if we can make Transformers-esque ships now too.

Funny you should mention that, as it is my only real peeve about the game regarding the combat mode. The laser shots come from what appears to be the middle of the ship not the weapons.

Yeah, that kinda poo-pooed the editor for me- whats the point when all the shots come from some magical point on the ship instead of from the weapon barrels/missile packs/lenses/whatever?

Another thing is the tendancy for the ships to play bumpercars. This is especially noticable with bigger ships and fleets, and even more so with fleets consisting of big ships.

Weapon shots do come from the actual canons. I don't even like to think how much time was put to make sure that is the case.

Please tell me the asymmetrical hardpoint problem is going to get some attention?

all weapons fire from the actual weapons on my game, and it looks super cool seeing lasers shoot out from diffrent parts of the ship annihilating my foe muhahaha, congrats to the guys who worked on those, as for 1.1, cannot wait, looks totally awsome

PLEASE give jewelry a basic description of what it is.
There is no point what so ever in a multible descriptions like: "Customize how your ship looks visually with Extras".

Still, thumbs up for improving the ship editor...

PLEASE give jewelry a basic description of what it is. There is no point what so ever in a multible descriptions like: "Customize how your ship looks visually with Extras".

Thats part of the magic of it, the jewlry is what ever you want it to be! A dome for instance, is it a bridge, observation area, power node, or a botanical area? The answer? Yes! It is whatever your ship needs to make it your ship.

Err allow me to rephrase (a little low on sleep here, so please pardon me if I ramble a bit ).

I was referring to the fact that its a bit disconcerting for me when my ships, equipped with long-barreled mass drivers and/or energy weapons, can shoot and connect with shots even when the barrels of their weapons are not oriented towards their target(s).

Its not that the shots don't appear from the area of the gun, but that the shots appear to be able to move in any direction from the gun, without any apparent indication that they actually came FROM the gun .

I hope that was at least somewhat clearer. But until I get a few more hours sleep, I can't be sure.

I recommend taking out redundant parts of the screen like the "design a new ship class bar" so as to make more space for other things.

Actually the problem with "things coming from the middle of the ship" is the ships engine "flame". It doesn't come from the actual engines but from the exact center of the model, at least on the hulls where you can see it.

Some more things with the ship designer that kinda bugged me and I'd like to know if any of these have been solved :
- Can you move your designs up and down in the list in the shipyard menu, just like you do with building orders ? (Asked many times, just re-itterating)
- Can you include an option to auto-obsolete any standard designs, because they get obsoleted anyway
- I had a problem of ship designs coming available ingame with a Terran hull when playing with a Yor hull type, which makes those ships look horrifyingly wrong (completely twisted, which is normal as it's a different hull), so will custom designs only show up if playing with the same hull type as the design
- Would it ever be able to add specifics to certain designs such as "Drengin-only", "Yor-only" so they only appear when playing that race to get a unique race-specific list of ships.
- Could you make more custom ship designs for alien AI races ? Possibly even make the AI my own "Yor-only" designs when it sees fit ? Would be awesome from a "create your own universe" point of view.

Looking excellent. Will the beta be available for everybody? Can't wait.

Keep up the good work.

Edit: oops, looked at the wrong window.

I'd love to see all the "jewelry" numbered. Theres plenty of room on the first line that each item has for text. I think it just says something like "Structure" is all right now. It would be nice if the "structure" was followed by a number, example, Structure 1, Structure 2, Struture 3, etc. Maybe put the diff jewelry is better order then it is now also (yes this is a small thing, but would be handy). Currently there are nacells all over the place, these could all be grouped together. Antenas are scatterd all over too.

Also would be nice to see some lil buttons that let us turn off stuff on the main map, like the mini map has now. It gets hard to see stuff with all the starbases, un-inhabitable planets, mini frieghters (which should just be colored dots IMO). being able to filter some of this out would be great. Even filter out seperate races too. I could go on and on abput filters heh. On the current panel right under the mini-map filter buttons is a big open area. would be great if you could squeeze in about 15 buttons there. I'd suggest button one to open a screen that lets you decide what teh other 14 buttons will filter. You give us a bunch of chioces, we get to pick teh 14 we want to filter most, or 10 whatever you can squeeze in

Being able to place "hard points" would be nice too. Many times I've wanted to add this or that to a spot where no hard point existed. I've been told you can "mod" these, but I'm a software moron. I need simple like the current Ship Builder is, heh.

Keep up the GREAT job guys. I love what you've done and are continuing to do. Soon as i slow down a little on GC2 I'm going to look into some of your other games. All I've played so far are GC1 (couple years there) and now GC2.

Heres a great idea for the ship edsigner:

Many people like to make symmetrical ships. Thus, instead of having to put each piece 2 times, could you add an option to mirror 1 half of the ship on the other? Kinda like the symetry filter in 3D Studio Max. I think it would be awesome.

I really like the mirroring idea. In fact, if you look at the current human scout model (as of 1.0x), you will find it to be not symmetrical due to the fact that the "wing" jewelry is simply flipped 180 degrees and attached to the other side. There's no way I know of to bypass this problem, and I don't see how rotation is going to help either.

Yeah, I hate when the ship I just built is lop-sided and it's not my fault.

I also noticed that some ship hulls don't seem to be even, ie even flat parts sometimes are off hight.

It would also be nice to have more control over the view window in the ship builder. It gets really hard to build bigger ships when you are always looking at the absolute center of the ship.

I am drooling over my keyboard!!!! MUST HAVE!!!! MUST HAVE!!!!

Are those three small ship icons (show all) (show equipment) (show jewelry) ? If so, Excellent.

If not, a way to filter out jewelry from the mod listing would be neat.

People have already mentioned that it should be easyer to make symmetrical ships. But I think we also need to be able to attach things to two already existing parts for centered items. For example I made two long Pylons behind my ship and wanted to have something connect to both and then hang an engine from it. In the end I made it look like it was attachedto both but it wasn't and it bothered me a lot.

here's something that would also be nice:

i know that the scroll-scroll-scroll hassle of the extras tab is disliked by player and devs alike.

i find that i only use a very small subset of the extras, and use them over and over again on different ships.

what would be nice is when i use an extra, if it could be moved to the top of the extras list. the idea being that the items that i tend to use would all be at the top of the list the next time i go to the extras tab.

this would remove the scrolling hassle, as unused extras would sink to the end of the list.

most ideal would be if the list update happened when the ship is saved, and only the extras that actually are on the ship got their list positions updated... that way i could try out experimental extras without having the ones i decide against cluttering up the top of the list.

of course, all of this depends on the hope that the position of items in the extras list are not hardcoded or meaningful, and that the list can be re-ordered at runtime?

so... would this not go a long way towards reducing the current hassle of the extras menu?

While discussing nice tweaks to the ship builder, I would like to make the following suggestions:

Make it possible to resize a componenty using the slider after it has been placed.
This would make it much easier to get just the right ballance between size of different parts.
This would be even better if you could select several spaceship components at the same time and resize them all (so ctrl+click to select more components and then use the slider to increase/decrease the size of all of these)

Make it posible to compare specs of the spaceship I am currently designing with existing designs.
Since all the acive components disappear when I "Upgrade", I have to memorize or write down the specs of the ship I am upgrading so I can see whether it is worth the bother.
It would be nice to have an area, where you could see the basic specs of one or more of my existing designs for comparison.
Alternatively a "Compare to existing designs" button could open a window where I could compare the spaceship I am currently designing to all the existing active designs - and then return to do further tweaks on the design.

Make it possible to resize a componenty using the slider after it has been placed. This would make it much easier to get just the right ballance between size of different parts. This would be even better if you could select several spaceship components at the same time and resize them all (so ctrl+click to select more components and then use the slider to increase/decrease the size of all of these)

Well, you should look at the 1.1 dev log https://forums.galciv2.com/?ForumID=164&AID=108257. It states:

A couple things new on the ship design screen. First, you can now rotate components on the fly in the X, Y, and Z axis. Pretty excited about that. You can even resize components after the fact once they're on. You can also rotate them after the fact.