Ship editor: Upgrade ship design

[julupu]

Hey there!

 

The ship building is quite cool, but I do have trouble upgrading ships as I advance in the game (new materials, new energy requierements, ...).

 

First suggestion is quite easy: There's already a button to change a block to another one, but this also changes the shape of the block. I think it would be cool if you could just update the material (e.g. iron to titanium), but keep the shape. This way you could select a section of a ship and update the whole section without acxtually caring about block types, corners, and so on.

 

Second point is a bit harder. How do people modify blocks that are completely surrounded by other blocks so far? I kind of dismantle outer layers of the ship to modify the inner parts of a ship (where I hide generators and so on), and then rebuild everything. That's a lot of work.

Only solution I can figure right now is, that either the editor itself identifies surrounded blocks and makes some space, access, by hovering the surrounding blocks away, or if I could select a bunch of blocks and move them temporarily away as one thing, or if I could make outer blocks temporarily semi-transparent to access inner blocks.

 

 

[koonschi]

Yes, I agree. We're currently planning tools that you can use to modify your entire ship, such as scaling, rotating and transforming into another material.

[Dinosawer]

As a temporary solution, if you want to upgrade your entire ship material, save it as xml.

Then open the xml in a text editor. Look foor something that says material="4" or something (number depends on the material, iron = 0, titanium = 1 etc)

Then, use the "replace all" function of your text editor to replace all occurrences of material="some number" with material="some number +1"

e.g. if my ship was iron and I want to upgrade to titanium, I replace

material="0"

[/size]with

[/size]material="1"

[/size]Save the file in your Avorion ship folder. (give it a name you recognise)

[/size]In game, it will appear in your ship plans, so just select it and apply plan, and if you have enough material it will work.

[/size]

[/size]Note: this doesn't work to upgrade to the orange stuff (forgot the name) as there are no orange stuff shield generators)

[Dinosawer]

Yes, I agree. We're currently planning tools that you can use to modify your entire ship, such as scaling, rotating and transforming into another material.

Is this planned "soon" or "at some point"?

No problem if it's the latter, but in that case I might wanna code something myself in the meantime...

[koonschi]

Right now we have other priorities, so I'd say don't expect it too soon.

[demonguard]

You can often change under-layers of components by zooming in or out to see inside your ship, just remember that you will not be selecting what you are looking at, but what you are inside of, so just select the block when you are in and check what it says it is, then upgrade.  With a little rotating and zooming in and out you can access everything in the ship.  Voila, no more picking it apart.