Recatek's Spaceship Designer Wishlist

[Recatek]

So far put in around 20 hours or so in the spaceship designer alone and feel like I'm starting to get the hang of it. Here's a few minor things I would love to see added or improved about it:

1) More straight beam lengths. There's a big gap between 96cm and 192cm, and then again at 384cm. It would be great if there were more 24cm (or even 16cm!) increment straight beams for more elegant/satisfying design options.

2) A connection diagnostic tool. Similar to the structural durability tool, I would like to be able to click a device or hardpoint and have it highlight (or show boxes for) every device that is connected to it either directly or indirectly, with both pipes (yellow) and cables (blue). This would help a lot of thruster diagnostics.

3) Sockets for piping. I learned the hard way that sockets only work for cabling, not piping. An equivalent socket type for piping would be very useful.

4) Better alignment of interactables with the pilot control panel. Especially placing progress bars can be a pain, and the process overall is kinda fiddly. It would be nice if items snapped better to this diagonal panel and were easier to move around on it.

5) "Do not autobolt this" flag for objects. It would be nice to check a box on an object to have the editor simply pretend it doesn't exist for autobolting.

Will probably have more as I think of them, but so far the SSD is great!

 

[Olivia]

I would want an orbital camera. I think that's the reason why I don't use the designer yet.

 

[mrchip]

I can survive without the extra beam lengths but otherwise I 100% agree

 

[CalenLoki]

1. Slower camera movement option would be great.
2. Shift+MMB to orbit around selected object.
3. Better object grouping in asset browser
   1. Decorative plates have too long names due to the word "decorative"
   2. Railings should to be all together, rather than straight pieces separate from intersection
   3. Progress bars should go to "interactables". Section could be renamed "controls"
   4. Battery should go to "generators". Section could be renamed "power"
   5. Doors could be renamed "joints" or "hinges"
   6. MCU and FCU should go to "controls" (renamed "interactables")
   7. Robotic arms should go to "furnaces" and it should be renamed "tools"
   8. Yolol racks should go to "yolol"
   9. Rangefinder should go to "yolol" from "thrusters"
   10. Hardpoints should have their own sections. They are used for way more things than just thrusters.
   11. "turrets" should be renamed "weapons"
   12. I'd move turntables and cradles to "hardpoints" or "joints" as they can be used for other things than guns
   13. I'd move tractor beam to "tools"
4. Autobolting "apply to selection" turned on by default, via settings just remember the settings from previous sessions. ATM test flight resets it all the time.
5. Settings for keybindings
6. Option to turn off snapping with cable/pipe tool. Sometimes it's too aggressive and go only for snap points (may be a bug)
7. Cable/pipe tool. Allow de-anchoring by clicking LMB anywhere, not only on the anchor point.

 

[Lukas04]

I think one thing they need to add is that there is only one Beam, but that you can change its size by a button press, instead of having to chose each one from the UI.
Would speed up building so much for me.

 

[Recatek]

I think one thing they need to add is that there is only one Beam, but that you can change its size by a button press, instead of having to chose each one from the UI.
Would speed up building so much for me.

Yeah being able to "drag-scale" beams (up to a limit) like you do for cables rather than having a list of predetermined ones would be very nice. Not sure how practical it is though. This would be amazing for plates too.

 

[Lukas04]

Dragging it or having to press like CTRL + Mousewheel to change its current size.

 

[Recatek]

Adding two more wishlist items:

6) Some ore cubes of various stack sizes, to test for weight and for space when bolting on or inside a ship.

7) Some small asteroids within test mode, to test mining, grabbing, hauling, ramming, etc.

 

[Amos.37]

Rotational snap points, at least every 45 deg, maybe every 15 deg. would be great for doing angled work. Rather than having to eyeball rotation.
Link it in with the autosnap, so you have the option of manually setting the angle or using the rotation snap points.

 

[Recatek]

8) A mass/weight display for selected objects.

9) A "plate bolting" mode that highlights plate edges/borders and also softly highlights beams *through* plates so you know where to bolt them to.

 

[CalenLoki]

As I learn SSC more, I get even more wishes.
I just discovered scene view. It's rather useless right now, but has great potential.

Those two windows should be merged into one. Just allow editing name and description in properties.

Also hitting enter should accept all the modified fields.

Scene view should allow drag'n'drop hierarchy control. So just drag component/module over other module to attach it.

Components in there are ordered by the order of placing them. IMO it should be possible to drag'n'drop them to order them as you want.

Multi-selection in scene view using shift and control, compatible with normal 3d view selection.

Double click on the module should act as "locate in 3D view"

Buttons to hide and deactivate specific module. It'd be especially helpful in selecting all the stray objects.



BTW being able to individually name each bolt in your ship is rather awesome
Edit: But the names are visible only in editor UT shows only device fields...

 

[CalenLoki]

More wishes!

For both move and rotate tool, those padlock icons should turn green when snapping is off.
Also would be great to have copy-paste for rotate tool. So it's easier to align objects too big for auto-snapping.

 

[Mutleyx]

I think what I would like most of all is better snapping of placing items, particularly attachment plates. I would like a placement mode that works the same as cable/pipe, in that it selects the position in the scene under the mouse pointer. This way I would not have to do the "bring it to roughly the right range, jiggle back and forth a bit until it snaps to the right point" dance. It would know where I am trying to place and could just best-fit that.

 

[Mutleyx]

Also, a better solution for the conflict between right-click hold camera pan and right-click remove bolt/cable. Lost count of the number of times I have damaged my designs by trying to change view angle! Maybe disable remove on a tick box? Or toggle add/delete mode instead of overloading right-click?

 

[Mutleyx]

Yolol editor to support shift-delete and shift-insert as alternate options for cut & paste. My muscle memory is hardwired to use them, and it just deletes the selection! 😆

 

[Mutleyx]

Yolol editor to support paste entire script from clip-board. We have copy but have to paste each line back in manually.

 

[Amos.37]

The ability to make our own pre-made modules.
You sort of can already, and just save it as a ship, but it would be much neater being able to build your own engine assembly, or pilots chair set-up, or mounted weapon with armour, etc, and then save it as a custom module to use in other builds.

I'm aware you can make your own modules within a single build, but the ability to save them, and then load them into different builds would be nice.

 

[TeoFB]

The ability to make our own pre-made modules.
You sort of can already, and just save it as a ship, but it would be much neater being able to build your own engine assembly, or pilots chair set-up, or mounted weapon with armour, etc, and then save it as a custom module to use in other builds.

I'm aware you can make your own modules within a single build, but the ability to save them, and then load them into different builds would be nice.

This is currently being worked on, stay tuned.

 

[Recatek]

- More fine-grained control over visibility of objects. Ideally a way to hide a group of highlighted objects.

- Some sort of solution for mass-renaming and mass-setting device fields. I don't know the best way to do this, but currently it's very click-intensive. Being able to set a field name/value all devices of that type (or that have that field) that you have selected would be very nice. For values that need to be numbered in sequence (priority values), maybe something to set them in the order you shift+selected them in?

- More generous snap points on beams. Objects usually want to snap to the center of beams, but often refuse to snap corner-to-corner to them, which can make precise alignment quite tricky.

- Multi-bolting. Like a 2x2 bolt pattern with one click, for armor plates. Or a consistently spaced 1x2 bolt pattern for attachment plates. Right-clicking still removes a single bolt at a time.

- The option to toggle bolt tool snapping to work in the SSC like it does for objects outside of it in the game world (especially if it works with multibolting, above).

- Better copy-paste and move support for pipes and cables. Especially the ability to reattach pipe and cable to stick to whatever you moved it on to, if possible.

 

[MyrddinE]

I'm pretty late to the party, but here are my wishes (some are permutations of stuff already requested above, and many I already suggested via the survey a week or two ago):

1. More snap points on objects. In particular, I think objects would benefit from two sets of snap points; primary and secondary. Primary would act as they do now; secondary points would only snap when holding a modifier key, or when selecting them in the snapping tool (where they would show up in a less prominent color). Secondary points would be the less preferred snaps on objects, but ones that are still frequently needed. Examples include edge points on beams and midpoints and center points on plates.
2. Key rebinding. I don't use WASD, but I'm forced to in the SSC. My fingers literally cramp from this, it's very frustrating.
3. Better UI for part-property navigation. In particular I see a variety of suggestions related to mass-part renaming (targeted at thrusters). While I know that you intend to automate that, I also believe the UI can be vastly improved by adding a key to navigate to the next selected part with the same field your cursor is in. Ctrl-Tab and Ctrl+Shift+Tab could jump forward and backward in the selected parts, but constrained to only parts that have the same field that your cursor is currently in (and auto-selecting the text in the destination part, for easy replacement). If you imagine it like a 3d cube of data, Tab navigates on the same plane, while Ctrl-Tab operates on the Z axis, moving the cursor up and down through the layers of parts (skipping over parts without a field that matches the cursor location). This would vastly improve a LOT of tedious renaming and management tasks for propellant, batteries, generators, controls, and more.
4. Change the YOLOL chip to be a 70x20 textbox (with line numbers), not 20 separate 70 character fields. This would require some manual character handling of the box (you wouldn't be able to rely on the built-in control to handle it correctly) to do things like insertions of newlines, moving characters that exceed the line length to the beginning of the next line manually, etc. The utility of being able to freely interact with the code far outweighs the slight confusion this would add to newbies regarding line limits.
5. Mirroring and rotation. There is a lot of tedium, especially relating to beams, plating, and bolting. I know that not all parts would be compatible with mirroring and rotation but that's not a good reason to skip the feature entirely. Quartering the work needed for certain tasks is very significant, even if other tasks or parts would not work with it. You could have an indicator that the current part is incompatible with the tool (such as having the mirroring plane vanish when using incompatible tools or parts, and re-appear when using compatible tools are parts).
6. Bolt assistance. It would be excellent if the same kind of in-world bolting assistance was available (optionally, via a shifting key) in the SSC as well. It would also be nice if this support was improved to assist with more types of bolting, to allow for cleaner construction. Some kind of grid support on plates would be relatively easy to implement and let us line up bolts more consistently.
7. Faster and more consistent interaction with fields in general. Text fields should register a click on any part of it (including the label), and always highlight the contents on the first click. The changed value should be immediately updated with no chance of loss because enter wasn't pressed or the ship was saved before navigating to a different control.
8. Better defaults. I cannot imagine a use-case where moving ghost objects 1m closer and farther is the most useful distance for the scroll wheel. You did fix the 'show overlapping parts' default, so thank you, but I think more settings could benefit from this.
9. Related to movement, logarithmic distances would be very valuable. For example, if the scroll wheel moved ghosts 10% (customizable) closer or farther every tick, rather than a fixed distance, it would allow for fast positioning at farther distances, but precise positioning when close to the camera. Similarly if the actual movement of the camera had acceleration it would allow for precise positioning of the camera when you're trying to bolt in a tight spot (like between beams) but allow for faster movement in more open areas when you hold down the key.
10. An option to tie the ghost placement distance to the surface under the cursor instead of 'just as far as last time' would be more useful more often I believe. It's difficult to arrange to have the camera the same distance from every place you want to put the next object; it's easy and natural to have your cursor pointing at a surface at the appropriate distance.
11. You've already discussed potentially building custom welded beams at a configurable length (so no new parts are needed, the computer just provides an automatically assembled set of shorter beams for any length). I'd like to request custom welded plate sizes! I know that plate welding is contentious; some testers are for it, others prefer that bolting retains its prominence. I think if plates were only welded in rectangles (using a custom X by Y plate builder) this would balance the desires of both sides; bolting would still be required for plates, but we could create plates that meet the needs of custom ships (such as a 60x288, or 144x120, etc) without having to deal with tons of attachment plates and ugly scattered bolting as we fit together random plates to fit odd shapes. This would save time and part counts, but not eliminate the need to bolt plates properly or require additional memory-hungry new plate sizes.
12. A "Connection" tool to diagnose the ship, primarily useful as you near completion. Select a propellant tank and it highlights the thrusters and resource bridges it can feed. Select a battery and it highlights devices it can power. Select an ore collector and it shows the cargo containers it can fill. Select an MFC and it highlights the thrusters it's controlling. And so on; in each case you select the source of a resource and it shows you the cables/pipes and devices/machinery that can carry or receive that resource. This would allow us to easily identify unpowered thrusters, unconnected propellant tanks, resource bridges to nowhere, etc... so many common issues. Some devices, like resource bridges, could benefit from modes or colors to differentiate between the different resources they can provide.
13. A 'relevant object' filter for the Asset Browser that shows me an intelligently filtered list of parts that have a special interaction with the selected part. Highlight a Pilot Chair and it would show you the Pilot Chair Stand, Arm, and Control Table. But less obviously, select a Medium Robotic Arm and it could filter to display the Tool Joint and the Fixed Mount Small Turntable A and B. Select a Turret Cradle Advanced and it could display the Weapon Base, but also the less known Turret Cradle Side Mount and the Pilot Chair Stand. Many of these interactions only work if you place the items in VERY specific orders that are not discoverable. The filter would help make these orderings easier to discover.

So that's my list. Some are really easy; others require notable development so I don't want to pretend that all these requests are easy or take no time from the Dev team.

Edit: Added 12 & 13