Shipmaking Q&A

Got questions about Shipmaker? Get answers here. Please read the stickied topics first!

Moderators: th15, Moderators

Post Reply
User avatar
Arcalane
Pseudofeline Overlord
Posts: 4034
Joined: Thu Sep 13, 2007 10:37 am
Location: UK

Shipmaking Q&A

Post by Arcalane »

Got a question?

Ask it here and we'll try to answer. Please read the thread before posting your question as it may already have been asked and answered.

Finally, don't post half-baked ideas of what things are. Make sure you know what you're talking about before you post a response.
  /l、
゙(゚、 。 7
 l、゙ ~ヽ
 じしf_, )ノ
Hypothetical Wisdom
Commander
Commander
Posts: 125
Joined: Thu Jan 29, 2009 5:06 am

Re: Shipmaking Q&A

Post by Hypothetical Wisdom »

Arcalane wrote:You have eyes. Use them;

http://www.wyrdysm.com/phpBB2/viewtopic ... 4481#84481
Look, man, I realize that you probably get a lot of stupid sounding questions, but I'm brand new here, and don't understand much about this stuff. I read that post, and it started right off talking about 'rotsections' and 'turretsections' and 'drivers' like they were common terms that everyone should know, and made no attempt to define them, except "turretsections are just like rotsections..."
Besides that, the guy who posted that even said that it wasn't the most well structured of informative of posts.

So I ask again, what are turretsections, rotsections, drivers, and triggers?

I don't mean to get off on the wrong foot or anything, but I really don't understand all this stuff, and I'm not really used to being yelled and having my first post locked simultaneously when I come to a new forum.
Will work for kewl sig/av

[i]There are only 10 kinds of people in the world, those who understand binary and those who don't.[/i]
User avatar
Arcalane
Pseudofeline Overlord
Posts: 4034
Joined: Thu Sep 13, 2007 10:37 am
Location: UK

Post by Arcalane »

I apologise, it's just that things are a bit hectic and we've been getting a lot of questions.

I'll start with the basics;

A driver is a weapon which drives a turretsection, telling it where to 'look' or aim. Drivers also act as the target acquisition for linked weapons. To set a driver, you select the section you want as a turret and right click the driver weapon and hit "set driver".

A rotsection is a section which is set to, unsurprisingly, rotate. Anything that's attached to them will rotate too. Rotation settings are under the ED2 menu in Shipmaker. Rotsections can be used to make spinning helicopter blades, for example.

A turretsection is, as explained before, a section that is directed by a driver. Turretsections are usually used to hold weapons. Example;

Image

Finally, drivers are also used to direct weapons to fire. This is a bit more complex. Each sub-weapon needs to have it's clip, reload and fire rate set to 1, to prevent glitchy behaviour. You set the damage and other specs like range, beam duration, etc. as desired. Select the weapons and link them to the driver with the right click menu. The driver should have the reload/clip/fire rate settings for the weapons, as well as a similar range as it basically feeds them targeting data. In this fashion, you can make a big gun turret that is like a normal turret, but fires multiple seperate projectiles or beams, and special behaviour (such as delayed fire between barrel shots for ripple fire) too.

Triggers are far more complex, and I'll leave them to someone with far more experience to explain.
  /l、
゙(゚、 。 7
 l、゙ ~ヽ
 じしf_, )ノ
Slayer0019
Commodore
Commodore
Posts: 535
Joined: Mon Jul 21, 2008 1:04 pm
Location: CT, America

Post by Slayer0019 »

I had exactly this fear of the new shipmaker. Well, two really.
First is that it would not offer any clear-cut definitions and/or instruction manuals on how to utilize this stuff. Turrets? Great! How? Basicallt I'm asking for noob guides, step-by-step procedures for how to do things. Explain everything that goes beyond the limits of the old shipmaker.

Second is exactly Hypothetical's problem, a hypothetical problem[/badpun]. I said this before the new version came out and I see it's come true: Noobs will be utterly wrecked. We saw how new builders struggled with the old version. Recall Aegis-bricks and nonexistent parenting. Worst-case scenario, they give up after being overwhelmed and we lose our income of new players.

I call for noob guides. From everyone. If you happen to fully understand some aspect of shipbuilding, make a guide on it so that we can understand it as fully as you do. From the simple, like general guidelines for weapon modding, to the intricacies of moving parts and turrets (which I have yet to tackle (or attempt for that matter)).
Got Steam?
Join the official BSF Steam group today!
Sign up [url=http://steamcommunity.com/groups/wyrdysm]here![/url]

[img]http://i192.photobucket.com/albums/z148/JohnDG/sig-1.png[/img]
Kaelis
Moderator
Posts: 1590
Joined: Fri Dec 14, 2007 4:46 am

Post by Kaelis »

I fully realize that the current amount of info is not satisfactory, and what is there is either awkward, outdated or plain useless.

Right now, im working on fixing all those bugs. Once that is done, proper guides and explanations of all the new features and additions will come. Its been only two days, and theres only so much one man can do in two days. So patience, the lack of solid information will be remedied in due time.
Hypothetical Wisdom wrote:I don't mean to get off on the wrong foot or anything, but I really don't understand all this stuff, and I'm not really used to being yelled and having my first post locked simultaneously when I come to a new forum.
You got the wrong impression. You werent yelled at, and closing a thread is not a personal attack, it just makes life for everyone a little bit easier.
FIREST0RM000
Captain
Captain
Posts: 486
Joined: Thu Aug 07, 2008 11:32 pm

Post by FIREST0RM000 »

How do you make amazing bubble shields like this and this? I can see that they are made of the haxagonal doodad, but clearly there is something else as well.
Malahite
Captain
Captain
Posts: 284
Joined: Wed Feb 27, 2008 3:23 am
Location: Poland, Some old closet

Post by Malahite »

FIREST0RM000 wrote:How do you make amazing bubble shields like this and this? I can see that they are made of the haxagonal doodad, but clearly there is something else as well.

Lookie here: http://www.wyrdysm.com/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=3495
[b][color=red]Comrade Malahite
Red Star Navy senior designer[/color][/b]
[i]"True beauty lies in the eye of the viewer"[/i]
[img]http://img403.imageshack.us/img403/8817/signeh5.jpg[/img]
[i]"For all we ought to have thought, and have not thought; all we ought to have said, and have not said; all we ought to have done, and have not done"[/i]
D00D!
Commander
Commander
Posts: 174
Joined: Fri Jun 13, 2008 4:37 pm
Location: Frontlines againest a piggy invasion

Post by D00D! »

Turrets cannot have any additional section parented to them, is this intended or a bug? It's cause I would like to be able to make very large battleships size cannons and is restricted by being only able to stretch the Turret.
Avatarless and proud of it! And being really crazy and screwing everything conventional!
Currently working on:

The largest transforming mecha EVAR!
User avatar
Arcalane
Pseudofeline Overlord
Posts: 4034
Joined: Thu Sep 13, 2007 10:37 am
Location: UK

Post by Arcalane »

1) TURRET. GET IT RIGHT.

2) They can. It's just that they're bugged right now. It'll be fixed soon.

@FS; the bubble shields are a single section, actually, not any doodads. That would just be daft.
  /l、
゙(゚、 。 7
 l、゙ ~ヽ
 じしf_, )ノ
Captain Trek
Commodore
Commodore
Posts: 534
Joined: Thu Jun 21, 2007 12:39 pm

Post by Captain Trek »

Being someone who never really became a big time ship maker (I could operate Shipmaker 3, I just didn't make extensive use of it), I wholely sympathise with Hypothetical Wisdom... I have absolutely no idea what the Hell any of this is about either... OK, so a rotsection makes section rotate... How!? As for drivers and turret sections, I understand the concept (I think), but I ask again, how!? How do i amke any of this work?

Christ, the Shipmaker's gone from mildly unintuitive to, to paraphrase Ben Crowshaw, just a few steps shy of Microsoft Access in terms of friendlyness... You can't honestly expect to hold on to new players with the Shipmaker in this condition (then again, considering the success of equally unintutive things like Eve Online, maybe you will)... Abolsutely nothing is self-explainatory and indeed, what I can seem to get working doesn't make any bloody sense... I managed to make the rear wings of a Hestia lookalike move inwards towards the core and back again, but only when the ship is facing to the right... If it's facing to the left (for example), the sections move in the opposite directions from what I intended, floating off their pylons and out into space... And when the ship is facing up or down, they move diagonally... How the Hell did any of this happen? Your guides are tightlipped and frankly, I'm already frustrated... And I'm a veteran! I've been around snice bloody version 0.62 where every shot admiral Cherenkov fired would cause an error and I can't bloody figure any of this out...

What is going on here Arcalane?
[img]http://i210.photobucket.com/albums/bb6/CaptainTrek/Federationsignature.jpg[/img]
User avatar
Anna
The artist formerly known as SilverWingedSeraph
Posts: 3447
Joined: Wed Sep 26, 2007 8:51 pm
Location: Elsewhere

Post by Anna »

Abolsutely nothing is self-explainatory and indeed, what I can seem to get working doesn't make any bloody sense... I managed to make the rear wings of a Hestia lookalike move inwards towards the core and back again, but only when the ship is facing to the right... If it's facing to the left (for example), the sections move in the opposite directions from what I intended, floating off their pylons and out into space... And when the ship is facing up or down, they move diagonally... How the Hell did any of this happen? Your guides are tightlipped...
That is due to shit being rather broken right now, because not enough testing was done before the public release.

And jesus christ, if you'd read the little fucking tooltips, and read the fucking F1 help manual, and even just casually look around the forums at some of the new guides posted, you'd realise that it's not even half as unintuitive as you seem to think it is. It's fairly fucking easy to figure out the how of it, even if sometimes it is complex to put into practice.
Founder and Event Coordinator for the BSF Beauty Pageant. Founder of the Pseudo-Chainship Project. Admin. Games Master.
Quality Control Enforcer
Gay cute girl and fucking proud of it.
Kruxynus
Lieutenant, Junior Grade
Lieutenant, Junior Grade
Posts: 18
Joined: Mon Dec 01, 2008 1:11 pm

Post by Kruxynus »

I can't get the ship deployer to work. I type in the filename of the ship, "Custom Ships\PAS.shp" but when i try to use it in sandbox, it simply says "invalid ship". "PAS.shp" is in the "Custom Ships" folder, can a ship not deploy itself or am i just doing something wrong?
[Insert wise quote/saying here]
SHAD0Wdump
BANNED
Posts: 413
Joined: Thu Nov 06, 2008 9:35 pm

Post by SHAD0Wdump »

If what you mean is a self-replicating ship,I just tried one and it works just fine. So you must have typed it in wrong.

Or you have Vista and installed the game into program files.
Last edited by SHAD0Wdump on Thu Jan 29, 2009 11:44 am, edited 1 time in total.
Kruxynus
Lieutenant, Junior Grade
Lieutenant, Junior Grade
Posts: 18
Joined: Mon Dec 01, 2008 1:11 pm

Post by Kruxynus »

please don't type useful information into barely readable text. I do not have vista, but i did install it to program files. why is that a problem?
[Insert wise quote/saying here]
SHAD0Wdump
BANNED
Posts: 413
Joined: Thu Nov 06, 2008 9:35 pm

Post by SHAD0Wdump »

It would if it was Vista,other systems I'd imagine would be fine,I am however unsure.

Can you tell me exactly how you typed it?

If what you have above really is what you typed,maybe you should type it again for the benefit of the doubt?

EDIT EDIT EDIT:Do be aware that every time you load up ship maker any and all ship deployers get their target file paths set to zero(0).
Post Reply