UPDATE: Ship designer preview stream delayed until further notice.
Today's topic: the best-laid plans of mice and men!
We had some last-minute complications with our build, and unfortunately this means I have to cancel the stream. Please accept my apologies, everyone.
Unfortunately, this is the reality of game development. You can plan and plot and schedule out to your heart's content, and then sometimes the build blows up anyway.
The team is hard at work getting the ship designer ready for release to our founders ASAP -- trust me, we want nothing right now so much as to get it into your hands so you can help us make it the best it can be -- but it's just not quite there, and there are some things that are preventing even a Paul-driven demo on the stream this afternoon.
Again, I'm very sorry. I still fully intend on doing a preview of the ship designer via stream as soon as I possibly can, and I'll let you know as soon as I do.
I hate posting things like this, and all of Stardock hates disappointing our fans and supporters. This is why you see studios stick to the "when it's done" line so much!
But hey, happy Friday, amirite? If only mine hadn't already gang agley.
* * *
UPDATE: Plans, as they often do, changed a bit on us.
The ship designer preview will be on Friday, May 2, at 3pm Eastern (noon Pacific, 9pm CET).
See you there!
ORIGINAL POST: We're taking a week off from the GC3 dev stream (check the replay of our Legendary Heroes stream showing off the new Leader Pack DLC if you need your fix), but it's all in service to the greater good: Getting you a sneak peek of the ship designer live on broadcast next week.
We appreciate your patience, and hope you don't hate us too much for the delay.
As a peace offering, I present lead designer Paul Boyer's (mormegil on the boards) new Skype avatar, taken from the obvious high point of our GC3 streaming so far:
In the meantime, I invite you to come up with the best ship designer questions you can so that Paul can answer them on next week's stream (which will probably be on Wednesday at 3pm Eastern, but that's not set in stone yet).
See you next week, and don't forget to check out our previous streams on our Twitch.tv and YouTube channels.
Thanks for the heads up! Glad to see Paul is such an animal lover. As for not hating you guys too much... the jury is still out on that one.
Super excited to see the ship designer...really hoping to hear some news about the next alpha update (whatever it may be) soon as well.
I kinda thought setting up an expectation of a dev stream every week wasn't a great idea. It takes a lot of time and coordination to do each stream and that's time maybe better spent elsewhere. Maybe every other week is ok? I'm not saying stop it all together, but just more resource allocation wise, and also having to provide new ocntent every week may setup bad expectations. Every other week or even like once a month (like Prison Architect does) for a web stream is ok.
Weekly updates I think would be better served via a post on the forums letting us know where things are and what the future holds. Save the video podcasts for 'big' reveals of content and do them on a schedule, but like maybe once a month or eveyr other week instead.
For a preview of the ship designer next week I will forgive you. Ship design as one of my favourite bits of gc2 and it sounds lik gc3 is only going to make it better from the hints dropped so far.
What's the largest class of ship? And how well will it scale with the smaller hulls? i.e. will the largest 10-KM capital ships be 100 times bigger than a 100-Metre frigate?
Will the ship designer allow us to see how they will explode
I will forgive you all if the previous hulls from galciv2 will be present. I really liked the components and hull shapes of the Terran so having that or similar sleek rectangular hulls will make me happy.
Also if you guys could start the game with all the techs that would help show us what the best guns and defense look like when put together. I want to see the biggest bad ass ship you guys can create and I want to see you guys like using it as much as we do. Would you kindly.
On a side note, I spent hours just upgrading and and having fun with the my ship designs last night. I expect nothing less than perfect.
DARCA.
A... I forgot to say how important the components are. I can modd values but I can't add components. That's why its so critical.
Blinking lights I want blinking Lights,... Seriously can they be added it`s cool to see a ship with a blinking light here and there??!!
also will we be able to mod the mine bases and maybe even Starbases??? also how hard is it going to be to add ships form PS4,blender or
other 3D computer graphics software??? will any ship Mesh ,...be able to work???
Thanks!!
Nasty!
Ha! If the suspense hasn't killed us by then. Looking forward to the unveiling!
While going through the game-files, I've noticed that there is a OnePerShip-tag. However, what if I want to limit the module by a different amount, like, for example, two Hyperdrive engines or four Doom Rays? Will that be possible?
In GalCiv 2, modules could only have one Category (e.g., Beam, MD, Armor, etc.). This made certain ideas impossible to implement. For example, I wanted to change the Arnorian Battle Armor to increase both the armour and HP of ships. Will GalCiv 3 be more open in that regard?
The Stellar Folder is most likely going to be Terran-only again. However, what about some of the other advanced ship-components shown in the files? Will some of them be limited to specific races too?
As others have stated, ship design is one of the most fun things to do in GC 2 and I expect nothing less in GC 3 (no pressure).
How will ship design in GC 3 affect combat?
(Other than weapon type damage, defense type damage, and components as in GC 2.
Also, in previous forums you've mentioned the possibility of roles for different ships. How will ship design affect roles (if used)?
(Once I was able to build Massive Scale ships in GC 2, I built little else.)
Will there be Stealth, Cloaking, and/or Active Camouflage?
(Stealth=hard to detect materials, Cloaking=bending of electromagnetic energy, energy intensive, Active Camouflage=reradiating background images like the Predator in the movies (several first person shooters use this))
Can we have some bling, or is that too hard to code into the gameplay?
(For example, I would love to paint ship components instead of being restricted to a particular color scheme. Maybe even add texture (metallic, organic, ceramic, etc. -- Shadow vessels from Babylon 5). Someone else mentioned light/lighting. One of the things that GC 2 really spoiled me on was designing my very own ships instead of simply placing components into prebuild hulls as with most other "ship designers" I've run across.)
Speaking of gameplay, how does your team code custom designs into the gameplay?
Understanding this would help to scope our expectations.
Will we be able to post/download designs?
I imagine the answer is "Yes" but would like to hear thoughts on how that will be done.
That's all I have. Eagerly awaiting the next iteration.
Calling off the search and recovery team.
I loved the GalCiv II ship editor, but there was always one minor annoyance: Because the components leveled up incrementally, each time I developed a new level of weapon, engine, miniaturization, etc. I would need to go in and see if I could slightly upgrade my ships. This would result in a lot of very small variations on ship designs and a lot of clutter in the building window. Do you have any ideas to help make fewer iterations of ships make more sense?
One idea:
Players can assign a number or a percentage of hull points to a certain category (beam weapons, shields, engines, etc.), then as our tech increases, ship designs could automatically update to get this highest point total out of the designated hull points. It would still be slightly more effective in many cases to go in and manually manipulate designs, but for those who don't want to create 13 iterations of the battleaxe, they wouldn't be missing out on much.
Hu? I only make five main combat versions of each hull not counting large and huge, they only have three versions.
But maybe you should try making ten versions instead of thirteen. Seriously, I think it would help.
Still planning to add it by June if everything goes well? Any chance of "early access"? I'm already drooling about it after seeing the ships in the game, especially Terran.
Can you "hide" components? for example if you make a neat looking ship, but you still need to add that one component but you can't find anywhere to fit it without messing up the looks of your ship. Or if you import a new ship model, where would you leave all the functional components?
Will there be things like player icons/banners/logos you can put on ships? Like some "your logo here" paint job in the designer, and then when at the start of the game you can pick a icon or import a picture of your cat and it will be displayed on all your ships, and the next game you take a picture of your dog and that will show up instead of the cat.
What happens if someone puts profanity/nudity/etc on their ships and you see it in multiplayer?
Will there be any way to customize what our weapons fire or engine thrusters looks like? Color of beam weapons, color of engine thrusters, etc.
Will there be any tools inside the editor that allow us to add decals, text or patterns to a ship on top of the base texture (something like nose art on WWII era planes or maybe just some racing stripes)?
How difficult will it be to upload our own textures into the game? Would there be any way that we can see what a texture will look like quicker than opening the game, testing it, closing the game, editing it, reopening the game and testing it again and repeating till it looks right?
From the screen shot in the founders vault suggesting you could apply blend and scale textures, what I'd like to know is are those procedural textures, texture files or both and how easy is it to add custom ones?
Great questions so far, keep 'em coming!
Regarding spending our development resources elsewhere, that's not really a concern. The stream takes time out of Paul and/or Ray's day exactly equal to the time we spend broadcasting. The vast majority of the effort to get a stream online comes from me, and I'm not a GalCiv developer
I help out the dev team in some other ways (feedback, in-game writing, etc) but believe me when I tell you that a weekly stream has no impact on the development of GalCiv 3.
I'm assuming the preview is coming Wednesday at the moment any chance of some screen shots of the designer for the founder vault before then , might help people think of more targeted questions.
In the previous game, different races had different hulls and non-functional, decorative parts based on the theme they were assigned (though you could break theme and use other parts instead). Will races again be assigned specific hull designs, or will all races be able to use all basic hulls?
Also, will different racial ship themes affect the appearances of weapon, defense, and other functional ship modules? For example, Terran missile launchers might be blocky, rectangular things, while Drengin ones are sharp, spiky, and triangular, and Altarian ones are sweeping wing-like structures with runes carved into them, and so on.
As was asked before about hidden or invisible components is there a possibility where I place 10 lasers etc on my ship but only have one that " fires " but still get the benefit of all?
Some of the stuff in the Founders Vault suggest yes e.g. the concept of the ship parts are themed for the races e.g. the Yor are given as an example with angular pointed ship parts.
I note that they said earlier weapons would be seperate from the visual design so the AI could reuse ship design with different weapons more easily, e.g. two part process designing ship hull then adding weapons.
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