How do you manage.

[Useless_Builder]

I try to have fun in games like this I love Avorion but man I hate my self in this type of games like Terraria or space engineers and Avorion? How do you manage not to rage quit because you feel like a useless builder or maybe it´s only me that all I can build is a cube, a space dildo or a straight line ship if your like me useless on building things how do you manage to not hate your self and keep on playing ? I see tons and cool damn ship builds and here im flying in my space anal plug because that what it looks like even if it was not my intention. Man I hate my self when it comes to this types of games so I end up playing them for 8-12h trying to build something decent but then end up never playing the game ever again have not play space engineers for over a year.

[Pob]

ok here's my tips

 

create a 2nd game in sandbox mode use that to build ships in, that removes the time and material pressures from you, although don't go too crazy you'll have to build up the resources in single player.

 

Start by just building the internals, then mess about with slops and angle blocks on the out side.

[Doc Savage NDMF]

How do I manage..?

 

Short answer: I don't.

 

I don't "try" to have fun. I accept the fact some other people will always build better than I, play better than I and finish the game faster than I. For me, the fun goes away when I start worrying or comparing myself to other players, so I don't do that.

 

If you really want pretty ships, there are many available to download and place in your game.

 

If you want to learn how they do it, grab a small one. Take it apart in the builder and see what they used and how.

 

From there, picture anything you think looks cool. An old car, a ship, a plane, an animal, your mom... Take what you learned from the ship you downloaded and go for it.

 

For the record, I build bricks too. Big, flying fortress bricks that knock ships out of the sky. No one in my universe likes seeing my brick with it's angled snout and '59 Caddy fins coming at them at full speed with every gun blazing. As I get used to the builder, I'll work into bigger, better and badder things. One or two might even look OK. (ish)

 

In my view of the galaxy, bricks and boxes and utilitarian containers would likely rule the skies. Science may have gotten us there, but commerce will keep us there. Businesses aren't about building pretty trailers for semis, beautiful containers for ship and rail or warehouses that look like mansions. As I see the future of things, my bricks fit right in. If we start hauling passengers, well that's a whole nother story... Even I will learn pretty for that.

 

There's no shame in learning. Grab a couple ships, some ideas and play around in the sandbox galaxy.

 

You'll get there.

 

Cheers..!

 

 

[SinBad]

I just own the cube. They are less about cosmetics and more about performance through component balance and placement. you can pack a heck of a lot of stuff into a cube because a lower percentage of your volume is given over to armour.

i pretty mine up a bit with a few cosmetic holographic designs on the outside as well.

so my advise is, own the cube and make the best cube you can (a cube will generally out perform cosmetic builds anyway)

[Useless_Builder]

Thanks for all the ideas sure I can use others ships but it feels like stealing in some way I wanna come up with a ship that people would say not bad I mean I wanna feel good in some thing I crate all im good at is playing games  that´s it I wish I had a creative side.

[Varkrag]

Here's what I started doing:

 

Browse images of ships and find key features you like (My latest favorite is "windows" of recessed  framework/scaffolding showing internal light panels or system components like generators/hyperspace cores), then incorporate a bunch of them into a simple clean shaped ship to really make it look cool.

 

Use Nacelles (engines or expansions separated from the main body of your ship, connected with small bridges of hull or components) [think Star Trek's Enterprise] to make your overall structure more complex. You can play around with size and placement of nacelles to easily make some interesting ships. You can make your "block" core with most of your components, then put your engines or cargo space or thrusters off that main body. Cut/Paste tool (Ctrl+C, Ctrl+V) and Mirror tool are REALLY helpful here.

 

I don't consider myself to be a wonderfully imaginative builder, but once I got confident with all the nuances of the build tools my ships have become more and more complex and fun to use.

 

[edit]:

My first decision I make when building a new ship is: "Do I want this ship to be expandable?" Most times that answer for me is no. When it comes time to upgrade to the next component or I need to seriously upgrade my shields/cargo space I'll use that excuse to design a whole new ship. That frees you up to be less concerned about symmetrical expansion, and you can put things where you think they look best.  If you do want an expandable ship then you know right off the bat that symmetry is likely more important.

 

 

[AngryGames]

I too am terrible at building awesome ships (the corners/edges mess me up bad). However, I did watch one of koonschi's video that is kind of a tutorial on how to build a ship:

 

 

My first ship was a long square hot dog and it's terrible but mines asteroids pretty well. My second ship looks like the one in that video above but without any corners (just square/rectangle blocks). It has 7 guns on the front and 5 salvage lasers just above and behind the main guns. It's not pretty but man it blows stuff up (and salvages) fast.

 

I'm still in titanium, haven't even hit a system with the green ore yet, but with the field generator, a few gyros, a ton of thrusters, and 5 regular size engines (whatever the starting block size of the ship is), it's like flying a Rifter in Eve ;). Plus I learned to build a little indention in the front to stack all of my main guns inside so they all shoot basically a "tube" of bullets instead of having them spread out all over the hull (where half the guns wouldn't hit anything).

 

I'm sure this is stupid and wrong, but I don't care at the moment because I've built a basic little ship that destroys bad guys, can be re-fit for mining lasers in about 30 seconds, and does something like 2km/s with afterburner / boost going. I guess my point is that once I stopped being frustrated with my inability to build awesome looking ships and just build a tanky gunboat, I started (and still am) having a ton of fun.

 

I started playing tonight at 10pm and when I looked at the clock, it was 3:30AM, my titanium was at 60k+ units, my inventory was stuffed with tons of loot (turrets and upgrades), and my bank account is sitting at about $940k (plus a few of my upgrades/turrets are exotics).

[DerpSuper++]

[bEWARE ALL YE WHO ENTER, COLOSSAL WALL OF TEXT AHEAD]

 

This is just my personal opinion, but it takes several elements, but mainly attitude, patience and practice. Trust me when I say that my first ship isn't anything pretty to look at either.  I'm not one for writing super long essays because I'm lazy to structure them and all, so I'll just list a few tips based on my workflow right off the top of my head:

 

General Tips:

 

1. Refer.

It won't hurt to look to the work of others for inspiration. You don't need to make an exact carbon copy, you can just pick out simple elements in them that you find interesting, or look for common elements that make their design appealing (shape, silhouette, colour, arrangement of elements like the engines, etc.). You may not feel the effects immediately, but you'll slowly get a sense of design.

 

2. Patience.

This can apply to the overall process, as you won't suddenly get all the Dragon Balls get good overnight. Be prepared to take hours to work on a build, especially in your earlier builds. I can spend anywhere from 1-8 hours (usually around 2-4 hours) on a single build, just to get it both functioning well and looking good enough. You may start out slow at first, but your later builds will eventually get better and be done faster as you develop a sort of 'sense' for it and your own workflow.

 

3. Practice.

This is pretty self explanatory. The more you do something, the better you get at it. Best thing is that you'll get better without even knowing it. This is one of my earlier ships. It looks like a bunch of random shapes slapped together, but... well, you get the idea:

 

 

 

 

 

 

Give yourself some time, and you'll eventually end up being able to pull off shit like the stuff you nerdgasm over on the forums.

 

4. Attitude.

This is probably one of the biggest factors. What we usually see is the result of someone's success, but not their journey to get there. If you see a really awesome looking ship (or any other outcome for that matter, from artwork to businesses and so on), be sure to know that the creator put a lot of blood, sweat, tears, money, food, house mortgage, reproductive fluids, his/her marriage and sacrificed their first-born child and time into it. You should DEFINITELY NOT be berating yourself for being incapable of doing such things because that just starts that vicious cycle of you being unhappy because you eat, and you eat because you're unhappy hating yourself because you can't do that thing so you hate yourself because you can't do that thing so you hate yourself because you can't do that thing... etc. And then you give up.. Instead, try to look at it like... You can do that, just not yet. Other people can do that? Well, you just let them do their thing, you work on yours. (Plus, it doesn't hurt to be a little competitive, you know, the friendly sort)

 

Furthermore, you have to be prepared to completely scrap a project if things seem to be going nowhere. Accepting that this will inevitably happen and being ready to just burn everything down to start over will take a huge load off your mind.  Trust me when I say that forcing it will more often than not just back you more into that corner you're stuck in. Though, this won't mean you've failed since you've still gained experience from it. Which you'll apply in the future anyway, whether you want to or not.

 

Other Tips:

 

1. Get schooled

Yes, I know... Studying, ugh. But you can take my word for this, getting the basics down can go a very, very long way. In this case, learn about design elements and design principles since you're, you know, designing ships. Keep those in mind whenever you build, and you won't even need to think about it eventually as it becomes second nature. (You don't need to think about how to use a spoon, right? You just... know. Same shit, different task.)

 

2. Design direction.

Establishing a theme or concept to direct your design, it can be anything as simple as "triangles" or "chunky" or something as verbose as "has a lot of cheap, repetitive, copy-pasta armor plate thing-a-majigs that's actually just a cheap, lazy son-of-a-bitch way to make things look good" , will help you tremendously, such as speeding up your workflow and guiding your train of thought when designing.

 

3. Templates. Templates. Templates.

It's not being lazy, it's a way to speed up your workflow and also help maintain unity (the design principle, not some magical friendship crap) and the continuity of your certain theme. Also, do you really want to manually build every single one of those repetitive, repeating bits of your ship? (PROTIP: Select the blocks you want by using Ctrl+mmb or the other 2 methods in the builder > Ctrl+C > click the '+' at the right side of the bottom toolbar > select a blank space in the list of templates below> Ctrl+V . You've just saved a template.)

 

4. "Build an ugly brick, then make it look pretty."

This one is more of my personal method of building than an actual set-in-stone method. I just slap a whole bunch of blocks together, in roughly about the shape I want, adjusting as I go, until I'm happy with the stats, then I start putting on the "skin" or "make up" for the ship. (REMEMBER:What matters more is the end result. People like eating sausages, not knowing how they're made.)

 

Example:

 

Comparison GIF of with and without panels:

 

 

 

Mid-Stage foetus:

 

 

 

A real life example, sort of, is if you peel off the trunk cover of a Zonda R...

 

 

 

 

You get this:

 

 

 

Well, that's about it. Hope it helps... Or not, it doesn't matter to me.

 

P.S.

Thanks for all the ideas sure I can use others ships but it feels like stealing in some way I wanna come up with a ship that people would say not bad I mean I wanna feel good in some thing I crate all im good at is playing games  that´s it I wish I had a creative side.

 

Well, if people post up their ships and all, it's totally fine that you use it and it's totally not stealing. Kind of like if someone publicly posts up all their nudes. But I feel you on that point, there's just something so satisfying about building and flying your own ships. :P

[Fox]

@DerpSuper++  spent over an hour to find this article again (searching "GIF without" site:avorion.net on Google finally brought me back here, remembered the very inspiring "naked/clothed" picture...), you should post it on the "Tips for Ship Building Post" in the Userguides Subforum to be easier found!

At least me came back to check it out a 2nd time, great read, lots of good hints!!

[DerpSuper++]

@DerpSuper++  spent over an hour to find this article again (searching "GIF without" site:avorion.net on Google finally brought me back here, remembered the very inspiring "naked/clothed" picture...), you should post it on the "Tips for Ship Building Post" in the Userguides Subforum to be easier found!

At least me came back to check it out a 2nd time, great read, lots of good hints!!

 

Alright then, I'll get right to that.

[Pob]

Great post DerpSuper++ I'd like to add to "3. Practice." with my earlier post of using a sandbox game to build in, as you can practice in there more easily without so many of the games systems getting in the way, not needing to worry about credits, crew and materials, although you need to keep in mind that you'll have to get these thing in a live game so try not to go overboard on them.

[DerpSuper++]

Great post DerpSuper++ I'd like to add to "3. Practice." with my earlier post of using a sandbox game to build in, as you can practice in there more easily without so many of the games systems getting in the way, not needing to worry about credits, crew and materials, although you need to keep in mind that you'll have to get these thing in a live game so try not to go overboard on them.

 

Ah, I missed that part out. Another approach I actually prefer is to give myself a set amount of resources in survival mode with the admin commands, then see what I can do with just that, since I also design my ships with playability in mind. It also helps a lot with resource management etc. Though, If I want to build something REALLY big, well... :P But I can see that if you just want to see how far  your creativity can go, then creative mode is the way to go. (because "creative" is in the name, huehue)

[Haystacks]

It's quite simple, I make something that looks absolutely appalling, then download all of Pob's xmls, and get a great ship that works lovely.

 

Started with the Gnat 102, then the 103, then the MFF 201 and am currently rocking around in a Megabee.

[Pob]

It's quite simple, I make something that looks absolutely appalling, then download all of Pob's xmls, and get a great ship that works lovely.

 

Started with the Gnat 102, then the 103, then the MFF 201 and am currently rocking around in a Megabee.

glad you like them :) try out the Nebular next ;)

[Haystacks]

glad you like them :) try out the Nebular next ;)

 

That was indeed my choice for the next ship. Have to collect more Xanium and then head back to a lower area to gather all the trinium.

 

I'll maybe look into that over the next day or two, been busy gathering Avorion and building 7K dps laser turrets :D