Yep, totally agree with ya. Also Stairs are not Airtight, & have stupid low HPs & damage resistance. I use Ramp Top & Bottom Hull Blocks with 'Ramp-Friendly Texturing' instead. Viva La Combat Steel & Armored Concrete Brawn!
Not only that, I can't remember a game where the stair climbing animations were anything less than hilariously bad.
??? How in the Halibut did my Alerts skip over a big fat chunk of Posts...? It was Luck I spotted them not being attended to. Remember the Law of the Internet... Proof or it's not real! Hey... I like Ducks... don't judge the whole Species on just some bad apples here & there... Geese... they are temperamental snobs... screw'em all. & be compensated for with a rise in RL Crime Rate. Evil is the reason we don't get to have nice things... Does the Voices happen to carry the Faction Tag "[OCD]" by any chance...? Cause that's the Faction my Head Voices are in... >_<
I just posted this over on the Steam forums, in response to your topic on the Workshop there. But I'll re-post here since it's relevant, and most people in this topic build every day, and love doing it. Hell - even I love it, though I suck at anything but bases. ================================================== It's not that you aren't trying, it's a question of focus - what part of ship building your time goes into. And the fact you have quantity over quality. I'll try to expand a bit on it.. First, you use models from other sites to get you started on large CV ships. Some people see that as a shortcut, a 'builder's cheat' if you will. When you start from scratch and build it yourself (even if you use a piece of art as a reference), people always appreciate that more. It shows that you care more about it, because it was *your* creation. Second, you create very large numbers of large ships. Popular builders on the workshop usually only have a few CVs, but they also have numerous SVs and even HVs. Players don't just use really big ships for everything, so you have to cover all their needs. I for example, in a prior playthrough, used Trig's ships almost exclusively since I liked the way they looked, performed, and blended together. He got thumbs up from me on all of them, and many others as a result. It's because he covered everything I needed - he had a wide range of ships to use. Third - builders that really want to be successful create Collections - ships or bases that relate to each other. It makes it easier for people who subscribe to one, to see others in the collection that they might also like. Every one they click on in the list to view, means a possible upvote. Fourth, and perhaps most important, is the big reason - attention to detail. Due to the size of the ships you import, and the enormous amount of time it would take to go over every block by hand to 'smooth out the bumps', add in all necessary equipment, etc.. basically 'finishing' the ship from a functional point of view... you just don't get around to it. Forgive me for saying so, but many of your ships look blocky for this very reason - they were never polished enough. Compare these to a ship where the builder obsessed over the shape of just one corner for hours, and hours, until they got it right. It can make a big difference - the attention to detail. Fifth, is the number of screenshots showing the ship in action. Showing it's functional details like acceleration speed, strafing speed, materials required to build, etc. Typically I believe you post a single screen of the ship, and that's all. There isn't even a list of equipment you added to it (armor lockers, weapons, grow plots, refrigerators, and so on). It doesn't tell a potential player what they'll get from the ship, how it will fly, etc. It's just a single screenshot - which is a complete unknown quantity for a player. And it's usually in space - how about a few nice shots of it on a landing pad, or flying above the surface of a planet. Or - loaded with SVs and HVs in it's bays? Sixth, is follow through - did you actually test the ship in your own game? Did you fly it with other ships docked to it, in combat, and in a survival or MP game of your own? Does it have enough thrusters to get off heavy G planets? Does it have enough RCS to turn adequately well? If it has grow plots, are there enough to support nomadic players, and are there enough refrigerators to store things? Are there enough ventilators? Is there enough fuel/jump capacity? Is there a warp drive? What weapons does it have? There are a LOT of questions that go unanswered if you don't put all of that information in the workshop item's description. Seventh, did you evaluate your tests and numbers from the last (Sixth) portion, and make adjustments to the ship, so that it met players needs better (either PvE or PvP)? Players really appreciate a well-balanced ship that has everything they could need, without having to re-design it themselves. If they can 'sub-and-play' the ship without messing around with it more, you'll get a lot more likes. It's a mouthful I know, but it's my honest assessment of why other ships in the workshop get more likes. You simply haven't "finished" yours completely, or shown them properly. If you instead took that 500 hours and put it into just 5 ships, you'd have five absolute *hits* on your hands. Even 10 ships would mean 50 hours each, to build, polish, equip, evaluate, refit, and so on. But when you reduce a large CV to just 5 hours of work - you get far poorer quality than pretty much *all* of the popular builders on the workshop. I'm posting this not because I want to critique your builds or process, but because I'd like to see you (and your creations) become better at what you do. Most of the ships have a lot of potential, as does everyone who likes to build. If you'd just change your process and focus more on the details - on providing the best you can on each ship with an attention to detail, I think you'd do much, much better. I hope that helps! ==================================================
Today I updated a couple of my workshop entries; Cottonmouth got the vents fixed, Junkyard Dog got the landing gear fixed so she doesn't scrape her nose, and the Viper IV a minor tweak to the bay doors. Also made a *really* cheap SV for getting out of the first orbit. Not pretty, unarmed, but really really cheap and takes all your loot and a few mates. Going up on workshop tommorrow, probably: Comes in at 144 iron, 110 Copper, 88 Cobalt and 85 Silicon at level 7. @hound All good matey, I know not all ships are for everyone. Cottonmouth *was* for a challenge, and I do know she's a bugger to get round in low- or no-gravity @Tyrax Lightning Cottonmouth has no stairs, just ramps and sloped shutters
I spent over an hour painting and texturing a small SV that I had already built just so I could put it on the workshop for people. Same with the latest HV I published. And then another 20-30 minutes on the screenshots and writing a description. I can spend hours just working on a single rectangular 10 x 12 x 3 block room. I build in passes. I start with a rough outline, and then try out details to see what does or doesn't work, and if it doesn't work I go back and keep trying. Or sometimes I later decide something didn't work and go back and change it. You have to be willing to throw away what doesn't work. Each time I come back to a build with it being more refined than it was last time, I see new details that can be added on top of that... those details I could not have envisioned without the previous layer being there for my imagination to use as a scaffolding. I have no idea what all of those details are going to be when I start placing the first blocks. Building just a hull and calling it done would be like writing a table of contents on one sheet of paper and complaining that nobody likes the book you wrote.
Amen. Its the last 5% of the work that needs to be done, which can often take the longest but is also what sets average apart from exceptional. And advertising is of the utmost importance. A great build with crummy screenshots will not see any traffic. A mediocre build with good screenshots will see more. Exactly!! If something is bad, its bad regardless of how long one spent on it. Either rework it, or start over. Just because the time was invested does not give an auto pass on the build. I rework a LOT of stuff, and the community has seen probably 20% of what I have made.
This is how it is done. I have plenty of builds that I have started months ago. Some are not where near finished, but over time you keep slowly coming back to them and make progress. Plus I agree you'll get out what you put into something. If you put time into something people will notice. Details do matter. Strive to push yourself and stop and take time to refine. I must say if there isn't any effort in thumbnails, I won't even give that person the time of day i just scroll past it. I have multiple versions of some of my builds. Years on some of them and if you are curious I would click on these examples to show you the progress I been trying to work on. My Frost Series: Frost http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=643761052 Frost-2 http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=710903722 Frost-3 http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=768227063 Frost-X http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1308389685 I by no means think I am the best builder, I have plenty of faults. But i'll keep building as I really enjoy it and love looking back at my older builds just to see how my style has evolved.
Really cheap is this one ... the MiniMe BuildTime 5:23 MinLevel 7 Needs only 40 iron, 70 copper and 51 silicon.
& also, don't sweat it if ya try new stuff & it doesn't immediately get fawned over. My Tyrax 3D Deathmaw, I tried out adding a bit more color to it then past Builds trying to do more then just 95% Solid Blue hoping to make a bit of Progress in this regard. As best as I know, no one's noticed via having told me about it directly... but that does not automatically mean it didn't work at all. Mind ya my efforts honestly might be a total failure... but if it was I have learned more what not to try, hopefully. So, success or failure, if something is learned, it wasn't a waste of time. One of the buggers about Experiments is sometimes they fail... but if the Experiment bears fruit in terms of learning something, it was not a waste of time.
No, my voices don't. Or at least not usually. The Courage came from those voices in my head. I said "I cannot make anything cheaper than my Turkey CV. That is my best economy CV." And the little voices said, "You are wrong!" There are bits of the shape that I would love to change but most of them have practical purposes. So little of that build isn't for some purpose. Sure, I did add a few bits to beautify the ship but not that much overall. I even tried taking off a couple of the turrets once, and it just looked awful to me. Not like my Turkey that I could strip off all the turrets and say that at least in the eyes of the creator that it still looks good. The Courage not so. I suppose I could totally strip off the side turrets as well as the turret "mounts", but then the sides would look even boxier than they already do. I debated putting some more angles on the sides, but what isn't occupied by the turret "mount" is supposed to be flat for HV side or butt docking to the CV. Sure, I can get most of my HV up the small climb to the pad on top, but those sides are supposed to offer some potential docking there too. It really cramps what I can think of to fix the looks. I have debated changing the front end, but then it would end up looking like the front end of nearly all my other CV. Before reviewing your CV, let me start off by saying, "sometimes stairs are the right choice". I used them in the Courage and the fact stairs are not airtight was critical for fixing my O2 flow on the Turkey--I actually removed top and bottom ramp blocks to do so. After reading the comment by @hound, I am going to have train myself to stop thinking of myself as clumsy. My unusual, accidental, exits of my mining HV are nothing compared to parking a CV on its side? Sure, I did land a CV upside down once, but I figured that out (and corrected) before exiting my seat. And when I have parked at an angle that made stairs an issue, usually a little jumping or the jet pack got me up the slanted stairway. But I understand the clumsiness a bit, it is why I designed my mining HVs the way they are, to accommodate my own, um, unique challenges. Spoiler: Reviewing KCV Soleil G7 What is their problem with the stairs? In a pinch, you can click on the cockpit from the floor below. Even parked at a bad angle, I could still go up the other stairs to the cockpit and thus most of that level. Unlike my Courage CV where a bad angle for one is a bad angle for both. Maybe I have been playing with the large thrusters too much. There were a few times I panicked seeing how close I was to the thrusters, but I would check my heat gauge and I was fine. So well done there. And the overall lift and thrust in various directions felt good. The roll, pitch, and yaw was good too. I almost missed that you had a full suite of the medical scanners. Now the two look at home on the wall, but the other two look strange on the ceiling. Matching their colors to the background I think was good call. As I said, I almost missed them at first, but maybe my perception is just lacking.... While I loved the exterior, the interior detail really makes this. For an economy CV, this sort of stuff makes it feel far more spacious and inviting. If I had any problem getting up "stairs", it was to get into where a lot of the mechanical stuff was. But it wasn't actual stairs you climbed, rather creative uses of railings. Fortunately, the only thing you would really need to access that was in there as well was the constructor. Something that is easy enough to find in the device groupings and access from the control panel. I had to turn on the HUD cheat to find the ventilator. Great job hiding it behind the warp drive. Doesn't block airflow and I could hardly see it. Speaking of airflow, I like. Costs. [edit: I don't track the cost changes with every update. Looks like the numbers changed and the Courage is about 200 less than the grand total above--old data apparently] Top line is your CV. Underneath is the Courage for comparison. And there is a reason I color code the columns. The first three are materials typically mined on the starting world, yellow the moon, orange that SV warp jump, and black CV warp jump. Now, you kept the Zascosium and Erestrum low, so odds are good that I could loot those even before using a CV to warp jump from place to place. I stripped the Repair Station out of my Courage CV with Alpha 7 just to be sure I wasn't dependent on the loot. As I said, your CV requires so little that it really shouldn't be a problem. I am probably more cautious than most in that regard. Overall, I would say a good economy CV. I wouldn't be trying to take on a PV with it. I admit that I was really tempted to shoot a handgun at this tank. I suspect the damage would be fairly catastrophic. But that is one of the flaws of the Courage too. On a small, tight fit, it is really hard to isolate the exploding bits from the squishy bits. So as tempted to shoot that, there would be no benefit in what I learned by doing so. Okay, I couldn't resist. I shot the tank. As predicted, fairly gutted this section. I did find your generator and core! They survived, but no fuel tanks anymore. Educational to know, but I wouldn't change a thing about the arrangement. In summary, vastly superior looks to most of my builds. And when you live on your CV, looks can mean a lot. There are only two reasons I would choose the Courage over the KCV Soleil G7. 1. If I hadn't found enough of those two top tier ores (ingots). 2. If I want to haul more than could fit in that bay. In all other aspects, from form to function, the KCV Soleil G7 is vastly superior to my cheapest CV. I love it. If you make it available on the workshop, let me know so I can give it a thumbs up and subscribe (without a poke I probably would miss when it got posted). Until then, if you are okay with it, I will leave this on my PC to try out in a survival game or two.
guess I'll go ahead and post a few pics of what I've been working on Spoiler: couple more pics at some point today I got tired of working on it and spawned these three in like this, tried to get a little more done on the big purple thing, but didn't really amount to much, still undecided on what I want to do with it: I've probably spent entirely too much time on it, but it's starting to look fairly nice (to me, anyway), and functions quite well while mining. had a lot of issues with it though, to name a some: Had to fix/workaround a motion sensor absolutely refusing to recognize me in survival mode but worked fine in creative (finally fixed it by pasting entire vessel on a new starter block, then re-doing all the grouping and signals). Then I had to deal with the drills refusing to go in first hotbar slot (needed for ore scanner functionality), eventually fixed by putting the drills where I wanted to put the gatlings, which required a re-doing the engine parts behind the drills and gats. Then I had to fix it not letting me out of the pilot seat unless it was docked or powered off saying "Can't leave a moving vessel" (even when perfectly still), eventually fixed by balancing it to the point that it does not move at all when turning off auto brake on flat surface (which required a lot of rearranging and moving hover engines around). Then I decided to try a different texture on some areas, not realizing my gun was on Paint entire block, which messed up the interior textures and some edges, I didn't realize this till later after some doing some other tweaks so Undo'ing wasn't an option, had to retexture the interior. Also I noticed the minigun from certain angles can stick it's barrel tip inside a block and fire through the vessel, typically only at something behind and below the craft. Not sure if it's worth trying to fix, I really don't want to move it up a block higher and mess up the front end (sorta pretending the minigun turret is an ugly hood ornament). I'm still debating adding a Multi-Turret on the rear end, which will add a nice functionality feature but take away from looks a bit (and probably require more re-balancing). Also have to figure out a name for it at some point. ugh so much work, for one vessel that'll be obsolete with A8, assuming it fixes sideways hover engines responding to normal key inputs.
I started work on a CV to pair with the little pink ufo SV I made for Jenniphurr's challenge Sorry the pics are so dark. Exterior shape is pretty much set, need to detail it. Setting up the interior I hid a hangar just large enough to comfortably hold its matching SV under the Engineering wing and central garden, without breaking the external appearance of the ship, which was important to me. The Invader will easily be able to get under and into there even when the CV is landed
Hmm... i've heard of Bugs before where Signal Logic set up for a Creation in Creative failed to Save to the BP correctly... I dunno if they ever got fixed, are awaiting fix, or if this could be Zombie Bugs back from the Grave... whatever the case, this may be Bug Report worthy. I've long wished for the ability to be able to Custom Arrange my Vehicled Stuff in the Hotbar Slots to my desire... Probably gonna be a long wait though...
Now that I have a reputation for Clumsyness...I am just gonna embrace it. I give you the BP-1....yes that stands for baby proof. Smallest CV I have built I think. left and right entrance for when I forget where I am or I am being chased. Elevator up to the floor. Just room for constructor storage med bay stove and fridge....for formula of course
Thanks for the comprehensive feedback. I'm actually kicking myself over the Repair Station because I double-checked the blueprint in my own factory and the exotic ores didn't show up (thus I assumed I had stripped the RS out to remove that requirement). The intent was a low-cost "starter" CV that could still pull its weight. As for the blast-test... I'm saddened but not really surprised. As you said, there's only so much space to work with in a compact CV, chain-explosions are a natural liability. The advice not to poke a PV is good, but I'd take it a step further and avoid POIs as well (at least, don't get within shooting range). In my own experiences, the bottom thrusters tend to be the first to go - something I regard as the only serious design flaw in the SE/LXS/G7 "compact" models. (By comparison, the NXT's thrusters are fully protected and their exhaust vectors shielded by armored glass, which I thought looked sexier than vents.) I wish I'd been able to work the Med scanners in better, but again, space restrictions. It was really the only way I could think of to fit them all with some semblance of grace, but I can't say I've ever been totally happy with the arrangement. Overall, I'm glad you liked it - if it serves you well, keep it, the G7 will not be seeing the workshop at this point (no reason, with A8 on the horizon). Mostly though, I would say to use it as inspiration. Keep the design elements you like, trash the ones you don't, and maybe we'll see a new iteration or a sister-ship to the Courage? Praise is nice, but I enjoy seeing builders progress even more. *(@Myrmidon mentioned the landing pad addition to Argentspire, but '(SOB) Ronan' ended up building a whole city around it, and since then seems to have used it as a foundation to build his own style with the recent Spartan BAs). I really like this one, makes me think of a space Cadillac. Lovely color scheme too. As for the trials and tribulations of development, I wouldn't worry too much. My brain is kinda fried tonight so it's hard to find the correct words here, but the gist is that A8's still a ways off and I've no doubt people will appreciate a finely-tuned HV that behaves itself. There are a lot out there that don't bother too much with balance so I can't help feeling anyone who tries this is likely to be impressed by the handling alone, good looks aside. Cute! Could use more of a paint job, but that's just me. I like the front end especially, though it's hard to tell since that's really all we can see Do we get an upload to play with? As for clumsy... just be glad you never tried using my old Avante in space. No grav gen, cramped interior, and landing is just bloody awkward thanks to the position of the "feet." After uploading, I wanted to give it a real test, so it was my starter CV on @Xango2000 's server, back in A5, and... good lord, I should just delete the thing. I tried way too hard to make something unique and stylish, and it was an absolute trash-fire.
After a lot of missed entrances and subsequent grisly deaths I reluctantly concluded that topside entrances are the only reliable way for me to get into smaller ships. I can almost always hit the roof. Almost.
That shape is eye catching. Your use of empty spaces to define parts of it is clever as heck. Great to see new approaches with EGS' kit of parts.
