GalCiv II v1.1 Dev log

Friday night fun at the office

Published on March 18, 2006 By Draginol In GalCiv Journals

The team is busily working on v1.1. I thought I'd show you some screenshots of what we've got done so far. Probably a beta of this will be made public next week.

March 18, 2006:

The 3 features here we think will make people happy. Still tweaking the wording.

But basically you'll have control over whether tech trading is allowed. Blind exploration means you don't get to see the influence of a civilization until you've explored sectors that they're in. And minor races control whether they're in the game or not.

A couple things new on the ship design screen. First, you can now rotate components on the fly in the X, Y, and Z axis. Pretty excited about that. You can even resize components after the fact once they're on. You can also rotate them after the fact.

What you can't see in the screenshot is that you can now pan with the left-click drag so managing much larger ships is much easier now. It should really free up how ships are made.

Sick of messing with what's in a given tile? The Fleet Manager is a whole new screen designed to let you organize what's in a particular tile. Still a work in progress.

Comments (Page 3)

YunHarla

on Mar 18, 2006

What you can't see in the screenshot is that you can now pan with the left-click drag so managing much larger ships is much easier now. It should really free up how ships are made.

Refering to the Ship Design screen, that super long list of 'Extras' components is a torture to scroll through! Plus they are say the same useless "Customize how your ship looks visually with Ext..." (the text isn't even complete =\)!
SOLUTION: Do collapse the list into a selection grid showing just the pictures of the components; after all we are only choosing the visual part to add to our ship, not the text!
(each page can probably fit 6x6 items instead of 6 rows/items. So we can more easily select the extras from 3 pages of 36 items each, instead of 18 pages of 6 rows each)

dctrjons

on Mar 18, 2006

This looks great! If we now only could (yes, I know, I'm never content! ) choose where the attachment point of the part we are placing is it would be a major breakthrough. I mean, when you place a part, you always glue it to the ship at the same point. What if I would like to have that engine up side down? Rotating it around the x-axis would place it inside the ship or something like that. I hope you get my point. Anyone agree?

Not really. there are easy ways to do that with the parts in the game. Attach an antenna to the point you 'want' the upside down engine to be on then attach the engine to the antenna....and flip it so the engine covers the antenna. Will take a little trial and error, but will be easier in the patch

Actually it's pretty easy to do now with the hardpoint flippers.

RoPa

on Mar 18, 2006

Excellent

Razius

on Mar 18, 2006

Fleet manager = drooling

Glostakarov

on Mar 18, 2006

Good stuff on the way, and I'll add my support to the idea YunHarla mentioned about collapsing the list of extras to just the icons. How many you could fit in a row would actually depend on your screen resolution (as well as how many rows, my laptop could easily fit the whole list on one screen). The "Customize your ship using extras..." text could be moved to a single box under the heading, to let newer players know that jewellery is totally cosmetic.

Alfonse

on Mar 18, 2006

Sick of messing with what's in a given tile?

Holy Trigger Roseblood Her Majesty Yes!

Can we upgrade from this screen too? That (and the selection bugs/nonsense) has been my biggest problem with fleet management.

BTW, can we get some automatic renaming that happens when you upgrade a ship?

Rustwork

on Mar 18, 2006

i agree with bonscott. my first upgrade i was thinking that exact thing. i would like it if on upgrade i could just swap what i want instead of rebuilding. i also think it would be helpful to have a more user friendly approach to saving and sorting ship designs. it just seems unpolished to have ships coming back with parts all mixed up because the core hull is different. an option to load ships at the start or in game would be helpful. either individually or group many ships into a theme that can be loaded. having to sort thru a bunch of irrelevant ships seems clunky. love the game though. keep it up!

Frogboy

on Mar 18, 2006

i still think it would be nice to be able to save a template of a ship. I.e a ship that has just the Hull + eye Candy with no components.

Saving these in a file where people can upload them onto the net and let other people use there templates would be pretty cool.

You can do that now. Just upload the .shipcfg and .shipclass file.

Simplicity2

on Mar 18, 2006

Wow! Great, great additions! Good work, guys!
This is what I call customer service!

My three biggest questions about the additions would be (in order of importance):
1) Can we still follow the whole path of trade routes into the fog of war on blind exploration mode? These routes can reveal unscouted planets.
2) As someone else mentioned, can we upgrade from the fleet manager?

Here's some ideas (or support of other people's ideas) for the next patch/expansion (and yes, I too am never satisfied.

):
1) NEUTRAL ALIGNMENT buildings/techs. I hate to even play it if the game is missing features there (learning centers).
2) I like the idea of icons rather than icon + text for the extras list. This is going to get even worse for people as mods start coming out with packs of extras.
3) Saucer/sphere/cyclinder-based hull-types and extras would be fantastic. It would certainly be a whole new, interesting style. I could see creating a whole new "type" for one of the races out of it. My Spathi race needs spheres and cylinders! UFOs, Rama-type ships. Droooooool.

Stanley Tarrant

on Mar 18, 2006

Sweet! No Tech Trading! No longer will universal translator come after blackhole eruptor in my games!

Yordians

on Mar 18, 2006

Very nice can't wait to download i like the idea about enableing the minor races

DancesWithLobsters

on Mar 18, 2006

I hate to beat a dead horse, but any word on fixing hardpoint alignment? Some of the symmetrical pieces and hulls don't have symmetrical hardpoints (though they look like they were intended to be).

ViriiGuy

on Mar 18, 2006

Oh thank you thank you thank you!!!!!!!!

The only thing I wanted, I got

Rotateable parts in the ship designer!!!!

Augusten

on Mar 18, 2006

Most excellent

To repeat other posts, the ability to Upgrade from the fleet manager would be huge.

Darth Purple

on Mar 18, 2006

nice

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