Ok, so I haven't been playing this game since a few hours in Beta 1. At that time I had issues with the ship designer and since everything was up in the air I didn't worry too much about it.
Now we are coming up on release and I find I can't make ships nearly as well as I could in GC2. My ships follow a sci-fi pattern. (Star Carrier series) This requires that the ships are long with a shield cap at one end and a rotating section behind it. (See my Avatar for a GC2 version.) The rotating section is complicated and makes use of symmetry as well as offsets and part scaling. The whole assembly is based off a rotating axis part.
In GC2 when you animate the axis part the whole assembly rotates the same way and you have a nice rotating section. In GC3 the mirrored parts rotate the opposite way and you have an ugly mess.
There doesn't seem to be a way to fix this. I tried grouping the parts. Nope. I tried Googling the issue. Found people had issues rotating the view and someone who had a simple section where he just did the opposite sides separately instead of using symmetry. Since my rotating sections are too complicated to do manual symmetry this isn't a solution.
Maybe my Google-foo isn't good enough but I was not able to find the solution.
So how does one go about making a complicated rotating section that all does the same way? And if you can't then Stardock why the heck not?
Disclaimer. I have no artistic ability and no experience with the ship designer i dont even know why i opend this post.
That said i seem to recall the devs saying something about you being able to take a bunch of parts and you could make them into a single part somehow. I assume you would then be able to just place that one part and set it to rotate.
Yep, you would think that would work, but no same difference.
the only way to get what you want is to mount parts to a hub and animate the hub. Do not include the hub as part of your assembly. Then everything will spin correctly.
I am still not getting the effect I wanted. I must be blind.
Screenshot:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/vzvppalzbaibcsw/Screenshot%202015-04-26%2016.57.35.png?dl=0
I have a central hub and I have a relatively simple rotating section that I have grouped. It consists of just 4 parts, just enough to prove the concept. I have excluded the hub as you suggested. When I animate either the hub or the part I get the opposite sides going the opposite directions. It is like they are still mirrored instead of just mirrored duplication when placed.
What really gets me is that rotating sections are a staple of many Sci-fi series ships, (I thought Frogboy was a B5 fan!?) but it seems to be difficult and unintuitive to make such a section. Even if I get it working I hope they fix this in behavior in the next release.
lecek
Do not use mirroring for this. Mirroring work relative to the mirror axes (these run by default through the origin cube, don't mess with them), not relative to the insertion point of the component. So don't use mirroring in the construction of the saved part.
With this method you can make symmetrical rotation designs. Look at my shaman; it oscillates instead of rotating, but you get the gist of it.
Success! Yay!
Ok, I got it working. So it isn't enough to group into a part you have to export it as a part and then do manual symmetry. After that I still had trouble because I couldn't find the parts, it seems they don't get icons even though the game folder has a PNG of the part for I assume that purpose. I finally found the part after turning on show parts from other styles and noticed blank holes in the list.
This has been as much fun as getting teeth pulled, but I thank all of you for your help.
Practice and perseverance mate just keep playing with the parts and don't give up!
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