Disappearing ship designs

Been happening to me too.

My BS 'no clue as to what is actually happening theory' is that there are some conflicts with using the same name as old deleted designs and the hide filter is painting the new designs with the same brush because they share the same unique identifier.

I also turned 'save ship designs to hard drive' back on - and yes I do know how that works I've been playing for months with it turned off - on the off chance something buggy was happening with this feature.

I also loaded an old savegame where my ship design was still present, saved a copy of template as [insertshipnamehere] backup. I copied the backup out of Documents/MyGames/GC2DarkAvatar/Metaverse/Ships and pasted it into Documents/MyGames/GC2DarkAvatar/Ships and then loaded up a new game, located the [insertshipnamehere] backup in the Shipyard Templates and immediately renamed it something I'd never used before.

While I was at it I took the time to clean out the many many many old ship designs that infest the Documents/MyGames/GC2DarkAvatar/Ships folder. It says delete in game but the files are never actually deleted from the folder. Its really easy to identify whats what in the folder as the filenames contain the full name of the ship design.

The path of the folders may vary as I am using Vista.

Hope that helps

Have you encountered the plague/disease event? One of the two reduces all your abilities, so designs that require miniaturization will be unavailable until you cure it.

Kryo I have the same bug. It occurs mostly with upgrading and replacing ship designs. It's really quite a hideous, buggy mess. It'll work the first couple times you do it, but then you'll end up with ships with weapons in the 'templates' tab, multiple copies of the ship under both tabs (and if you delete one, they ALL get deleted), etc.

Kyro, no, this is not a case of any event rendering my unable to actually produce the ship in question. Uranium is right. This is a buggy mess.

Litcube - well, our problems might not be related as much, you said yours just *POOF* go away - mine go away due to major code mixups that I can recreate, and it's done by my action.

At any rate, my problem could be solved by using unique ID's to flag ship designs, not names.

If you can reproduce it then, zip up before and after saves and send them in with instructions to reproduce and a link back to this thread to [email protected].

This would require the contents of my ships and shiptemplates folders too, I assume....

So I loaded up a saved game the other day, made an awesome design before work one morning...saved the design, quick built the ship just to see what it would look like AND THEN QUIT the game, without saving.

When I loaded the game up a few days later, the design was not in there. I didn't even use components on the hull!!! It was just a Med. Thalan style, blank "the cube", shell of a design!!

However, upon inspecting my ships folder, the design is in there...

Tried replacing its contents with a ship that does show up...but alas...to no avail...


EDIT:: Let me state the events more clearly...

Loaded saved game, did not take a turn, just clicked on shipyard
Made a new ship design without components, just the shell,
Saved the ship design,
Bought the ship, completed one turn so that I could see how it looked out in the "open"
Quit the game (Did not save the game, before exiting.)

::At a later date::

Loaded said game, ship design not in menu
Upon investigation found the ship name and files in the proper folders...
Unable to resolve.

Hope that helps..

That has always been standard in GCII: DL and DA and I would assume TA, if it wasn't changed.

Changes to the Ship folder do not take effect in an already ongoing game, for some reason.

If you don't save the game after developing a new design, the design itself is saved for future games, but is not considered available for THAT game, even if you have all the req'd techs, because as you didn't save, the computer has no "memory" of this change to the ship folder being made during that game, so thinks the file must have been created elsewhere and ignores.

It works much the same way it would if you were playing two games concurrently, you can't design a ship in one game, save, open up your second separate game and find the ship "in that universe" even if you are using the same ship style and have all the required techs.

However if you start a new game, your ships will pop up as appropriate...or if you start a new Battle of the Gods all of your ship designs will be immediately available. As it seems the computer "resets" your shipyard to "include all" at the beginning of every new game.

So it's a simple as saving the game after you complete your design. Just close the Shipyard window and save. Now the design is "in the game." Now go do whatever you want and restore the save when ready.

All concerned: I've found that the best way to cleanup the Shipyard is to create a "junk ships" folder inside the Ships folder. Since the file names are relatively easy to recognize it's simply a matter of moving the "junk" to the Junk Ships subfolder. Additionally, if you ever decide something wasn't junk after all, move it back and there you go. Takes significantly less time than deleting it through the Shipyard and a lot less permanent.

Of course your changes to the Ships folder in or out will only take effect at the beginning of a new game.