Shipbuilding Improvements - 100% Ship Part Sell Price, Door Location Variants

[CaptainBrian]

Shipbuilding has great potential but is held back by some glaring oversights. I'm not gonna go into criticizing it too much here, because the fixes seem very doable with modding.

1. 100% Ship Part Sales Price.

This will allow you to swap out parts, see what the interior looks like, and jump between systems to try on different parts to see how they look and function. Right now you have to save and load constantly while building. This seems like the easiest way to solve most of the issues with shipbuilding.


2. Door Location Variants.

Basically, add variants for all the habs with doors in different locations (forward and rear only, forward and rear with 2 in the front sides, forward and rear with 2 in the rear sides). This is potentially more work than number 1, but solves different issues. Even with 100% refunds on parts, the randomness of the door locations makes many designs impossible, leaving the player with weird mazes.

 

3. Leave interior furniture alone when placing porthole windows.

I love the idea of windows all over the place, but right now as soon as you do it totally changes the interior making most rooms worthless after getting rid of the furniture. A better way would be to basically have the windows just change the wall section, but leave the furniture and stations alone. This is probably a pain and will require 3d model editing, and even then you might end up with weirdness like a window wall behind a shower, but I'd say so be it. I want to be able to use windows without having my rooms stripped bare.

3. Stairwells.

 

I prefer stairwells and hate the ladder animation and how it slows down player movement through the ship. This is the most work of all since it has to do with pathing, modelling, etc, so this is a nice to have but not a must have.

I got no idea what I'm doing when it comes to modding bethesda games, but I've modded others before. I'll take a look once the modding scene matures and there's more info out there on how to do some of this stuff. In the meantime, if a seasoned modder wants to tackle any of these then it would be much appreciated!

[CaptainBrian]

Door rotation is probably best done with the flip button. I actually just found some Taiyo parts that did just that. When you flipped the design it removed or moved the doors. I don't know why they just didn't do that on all the parts but that seems like the best spot for them so they don't clutter up the variants options already in the game.

[marchellonastroenie]

Another idea is to create some kind of blocker part, you put it where you don't want the doors. This part has two attachment points and should somehow have zero thickness so that habs can connect despite that part. Or this part could indicate where you actually want the door to be, but my guess that restricting part mechanic will be easier to do.