A Couple Bugs/Issues and Questions

I’ve run into a couple of bugs involving the various engine exhaust effects.

Issue 1: No matter what angle I orient the exhaust effect in the editor, in play the exhaust re-orients itself to fire away from the direction the ship is moving (and turns off when the ship is halted). It would be nice to have the exhaust always fire in the direction I placed it in the editor, and it would be great to have an option for the effect be always on (my intention was to simulate non-propulsion related exhaust/venting). In addition to an always-on option, it would be nice to be able to have a firing time interval control for the exhaust effects (not dissimilar to the rotation slider).

Issue 2: Almost every time I try to create a composite component that includes engine exhaust elements, it breaks. If I go back into the editor after saving, the composite has separated and reoriented into its base elements. This is especially true with spinning composites (of which I have had zero success in creating).

Question 1: How viable would a turret editor be? It would be very cool to be able to alter the appearance of weapon turrets to reflect our custom ship designs.

Question 2: Are there any modding guides/resources for GSB2? If not, are their any plans for any? The file structure looks to be substantially different than GSB1.

I’ve noticed the breaking composite thing too. It’s very frustrating because it’s made editing some of my highly complex ship designs completely impossible. Grouped components need to stay grouped forever (well, at least until you manually break them).

To expand on this issue – GSB 2 has real issues saving and loading ship components. If you save and load a ship repeatedly from the component design screen, many components will shift around, component groups will break up, z-axis values seem randomized, and several components will actually shrink. After several save/load cycles, the ship will look quite different from the original design. As it is currently, editing the visuals of a ship is a major turn-off, since every time I save/load visuals the components move around.

Looking my saved ship text files, based on my observations the game seems to have several major compounding issues when saving:

Issue 1: Over half of the values saved for each component are saved to the 6th decimal place – but the game seems to round component values to the 3rd decimal place when loading components. Since the values affected are size and position, it would explain why the object properties are changing and components are shifting and shrinking.

Issue 2: Objects are saved with both x and y size values – if one value gets rounded the other will conform and start a cycle of rounding.

Issue 3: The game seems to arbitrarily group components into layers – this is likely breaking existing composite components in the design. Also, it too saves position and size to the 6th decimal place.

The compounding effect would explain why components are shifting around – the layer is shrunk while rounding, which in turn shifts and shrinks the components which are themselves rounded – which changes the position and size of the entire layer, resulting in a cycle of shifting and shrinking on each save/load.

Components with values only to the 3rd decimal place in layers with values only to the 3rd decimal place do not shift on a save/load. Ex: A size 1.000000 engine effect alone in a size 1.000000 layer.

Components grouped into layers also seem to sometimes average their z-axis values – would explain why the z-axis value is never loaded correctly.

These issues may also create values which could cause a crash on loading.

Rounding could also be the reason that mirrored objects are sometimes not placed accurately.

Some ideas to enhance the ship designer:
All components by default should not be saved as a layer – the exception is composite components saved as an independent layer.

It would be nice for the ship designer to save values as shown in the UI – size to the 3rd decimal, rotation to the 3rd, and so on and the ship designer should not alter values when loading.

Also, I couldn’t tell if components were saved with z-value; that would be really nice to have.

Another nice addition would be if the z-axis was only ±0.100 instead of -0.100 and +0.990
The smaller range would give us better z-axis control in the interface

It would also be nice for the ship designer to save components by alphabetical order or something – it would make it a lot easier if someone wanted to manually edit the file to make say, all of the windows on the ship the same size or find duplicate components that can’t be seen due to stacking in the actual editor.

While I’m working on this stuff check this out:
http://www.gratuitousspacebattles2.com/modding.html
Also this:

Cheers

Thanks for reporting this. I’d never tried it, so I never encountered it. I’m fixing it now…

Wow, this is some great troubleshooting, thanks for figuring all that out.