UI request for ship designer

i'd like to start by saying that i love all the new jewelry available in DA. i've got plans for an extensive set of custom templates for several of my favorite races, which when the time comes i'll upload to the library for all to use. i make intensive use of Kryo's HSM for my designs, as I find the offsets (among other pieces) to be an extremely useful tool for getting pieces into the perfect places.

this brings me to my point. i've started building a massive city-ship, but only just started. i've already used dozens of jewelry pieces, and making adjustments has become difficult. i have to jump to page 2 of my jewelry pieces to adjust or move more-recently added pieces.

it'd be very nice if the game would 'stick' to whatever page of ship components i last left it on. as it is, once i place a new piece or remove an old one, it jumps back to page one.

i play at 1920x1200. that's a lot of space for ship components (pardon the pun), but i find myself still running out of it easily on more complex ships. i can only imagine the difficulty more artistic players might feel at smaller resolutions.

of course other organizational utilities would be wonderful in the ship designer (like the option to turn on a big flashing arrow that'll point to a selected component). i can think of cool perks, such as the ability to add text components to describe pieces of the ship that aren't functional in game terms, but whose descriptions would show up in the ship intelligence report (that'd be sweet! i'd imagine a clumsy version of this could be modded in, but it'd be nice to be able to do it on the fly in the game).

but my life as a ship builder would be vastly easier if only i didn't have to flip through pages upon pages of jewelry with unnecessary repetition. please, add a sticking function to the component/jewelry list in the ship designer! i'm sure you're busy with fixing bugs and all, but i'm a patient person. thank you.

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bump - curious if anyone else feels similarly.

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DivineWrath

Join Date 05/2006

+135

I do have some problems with the ship designer myself. Let me list them.

Miniturization:
In order to determine your current miniturization score, you have to leave the ship editor. I find this annoying, because I like to include the miniturization score in my ship name. That way, I can determine which ship is bigger just by looking at the name. I would like the current miniturization score to be shown when you build your ship.

No numbers provided for sliders and stuff:
I don't like the slider system for adjusting the size or angle of parts. You can't easily determine if two parts of the same type is the same size or not. I would like to have the current size value to be listed as a number. In fact, I would much rather be able to adjust this number directly. You know, select the box, and then type in a number for the part size.

List Prerequisites:
I'm a player who not only designs ships to defeat the AI in the game I made the ships, but also to design them well for the next. I would like to be able to see the prerequisites list that you need to build the ship, so I can better adjust them for the next game.

I think thats all I can think of... for now.

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bump - curious if anyone else feels similarly.

I most certainly do.

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No numbers provided for sliders and stuff:
I don't like the slider system for adjusting the size or angle of parts. You can't easily determine if two parts of the same type is the same size or not. I would like to have the current size value to be listed as a number. In fact, I would much rather be able to adjust this number directly. You know, select the box, and then type in a number for the part size.

that's a good one! as it is i usually design one half of a ship first, then then tediously click on every placed piece to get the size and alignment just right, then place it in its proper position on the other half of my ships. and i also won't go below 15 degrees of rotation because it becomes too hard to keep track of how rotated a piece is.

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List Prerequisites:
I'm a player who not only designs ships to defeat the AI in the game I made the ships, but also to design them well for the next. I would like to be able to see the prerequisites list that you need to build the ship, so I can better adjust them for the next game.

you can find this info in the tech tree. though i would add that all it'll say re: mini score is "*needs more miniaturization", whereas if it'd tell you what mini score it needed, it'd be easier to work with.

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