Ship Designer

Greetings,

Hopefully this has not been posted before. I wanted to provide a link to a site where you can "draw' out basic ship design. It is a Minecraft circle/ellipse/rectangle/line generator on a grid. It will make sense when you see it. I have used it for several "block" type games to design basic layouts very quickly. It will let you create the above shapes.

http://www.mineconics.net/

Once you have your shape, open up PAINT application (default Windows App.). Then hold down SHIFT and press PRTSCR on the keyboard. Save the file somewhere.

You can now open up the file while building your ship (HV, SV or especially CV) and "count" the blocks to reproduce. Just bounce back and forth between PAINT and Empyrion.

It at least gets you a very good starting point and helps to make "round" shapes out of "square" blocks.

I assume there are other such programs (please post if something more simple - I would be curious), but I figure this could help some people. You simply CLICK and HOLD on a spot and drag out. The coordinates show up in the top left for each item you create. So if you want the same section side by side, just choose same shape and match the output coordinates.

It will make sense after your first click and drag. Here's one that took me about 30 seconds.

 

thank you for sharing!

 

Yep, there's also plotz.co.uk which does circles/ellipses as well as 3-d torus/sphere and some prefabricated stuff like wizard towers.

I do mine like this so that I'm not restricted to standard shapes:

 

I checked that site out. Very cool. Thanks.

 

Yep, this is an essential tool for larger builds, anything beyond 100 blocks long takes outlining and planning to build effectively. I used a similar pixel circle generator tool for my latest project, but this is MUCH more powerful. Thanks for the great link!

 

I've been fooling around with a 3d voxel painter for Empyrion. It's probably never getting done because of all the time I don't have.

See for your selves: http://hoxer.net/empyrion/voxel/index.html

Hold insert and drag to rotate the scene. And keep in mind that some of the blocks are buggy, so the suggested placement of each voxel might be bothering you.

 

That is pretty sweet. I had to hold Shift to rotate the screen.

 

Now all we need is a converter to the Empyrion ship file format for the web tool.

 

For circles and curves or the "zigzag" lines, I use Gimp (freeware).

 

Yeah, but I think going all in on making a web based ship designer is way more than I could handle on my own. My goal for the tool was creating crude or rough designs.

 

Made this SV frame with your hoxer.net voxel tool. Kinda buggy with the Half and quarter blocks but all in all pretty useful.

 

I'd be willing to help with this. However I don't know how to reverse engineer the saved prints. If the devs wanted to chime in here and provide some input on the method? object structure and serialization?

 

this tool is awesome! would love it if more of the shapes where included

 

So what can we do to help? Convert shapes? import textures?

 

I've been designing a ship in Sketchup with some basic shapes I made (available now on the Sketchup Warehouse - see below) and must say how great it is to design in Sketchup - everything is 10x faster than designing in E.G.S!

Highly recommend you try it using the (albeit incomplete) library below.

https://3dwarehouse.sketchup.com/mo...-bd14-b5ddf9495fee/Empyrion-Block-Library-WIP