I am dedicating myself to making a frying pan ship, it will fire baconbeams!

Now i need someone to make a particle beam for me so i can insert the bacon mesh into it...

Good point harpo, but what if it shoots poisened or hot bacon?

Damnit...well then lets just use the premice that the Advent don't eat meat because it goes against their beliefs. The TEC don't eat meat because they believe it goes against the "combat is bad" thing. And the Vasari don't eat meat because they just don't.

The Advent don't engage in trade and have large population.  Of course they eat pork, it's just the 'Long' variety.  It's rich in neurotransmitters and vitamin D for strong and healthy Psi-Integrats.

K, All crackheadery aside.  Template creation in GF is a pain in the ass compared to just putting the template in GSDef.

Plenty of planet mods have added Galaxy Forge icons just fine, are you sure they were the correct size?

Okay, I figure since you may still be asking for suggestions I'd give my input.  This is a list of things I'd like to see done for galaxy forge and what I feel would make it a LOT better.

1.)  Faction naming.  When you set the in-game name for a faction, that name should appear as selected in the game instead of the default AI faction names (such as Arn Consortium or Nithiem Rebels or whatever) and instead of whatever the player chooses as a name.  This is a basic mechanic in galaxy forge that simply doesn't function and needs fixed. 

2.)  Fix the map editor so players really are restricted to a certain race.  It seems you have this option available, yet it doesn't work.  In the event of AI playing, allow us to determine the attitude and difficulty of that AI.  For instance, a player joins a game and sees that one of the AI is an advent set as a researcher on vicious.  Locking certain player slots to certain factions would also be good.  For instace, player 1 would be TEC starting out on the west side of a map, player 2 would be Vasari starting out on the east side of the map.  Also, your Galaxy Forge has a habit of ignoring what map makers set as the starting gold, metal, crystal of each player.  Fixing that would be an improvement.

3.)  Fix militias and pirates so one doesn't need to open up the notepad and change the Planet Owner section just to ensure their pirates/ militias show up.  For those of us who know some coding, its not too much of an inconvenience, but for a system that claims to be user friendly, having multiple parts of your program require its user to bypass using it in favor of altering that code in a notepad or textpad seems counterproductive and highly inconvenient for those who may have no experience in coding otherwise. 

4.)  Allow us to change the names of the militias.  Just as we may want to alter the names of all the players currently in-game, we may also want to change the name of the militias involved.  This would be highly useful for those of us looking to make "campaign-like" maps.

5.)  Update the Galaxy Forge so players can use the recent ships, bonuses, artifacts, starbases, etc. introduced in Entrenchment and Diplomacy.  A mod was published by a player that allowed people to do this with galaxy forge so there's no reason you, as the official source, shouldn't be able to. 

6.)  Add the ability for us as map builders to alter the level of starting capital ships and decide what upgrades starbases will start with.  This would be nifty, as stated, for campaign purposes.

7.)  Allow us to determine at what research level players will start out with!  It might be cool starting players out at max research or at varrying levels of research depending. 

8.)  Allow us to determine the starting diplomacy of the players as well.  For instance, are certain faction currently at war?  Are certain ones at peace?  Are they allies?  Are they at peace happily or is the peace undertoned with disfavor and on the verge of breaking?  It'd be great altering not only who is allied or at war with who but what level of favor they are as well.

9.)  Being able to zoom out further would be VERY helpful.  You have no idea how frustrating it can be, especially when you have big maps with many systems involved, to have to constantly use the scroll bar. 

10.)  An undo function as stated is a must.

11.)  Deleted objects should not drag down the whole game and should be deleted.  Its very awkward clicking on the spot you deleted an object to find it still apparently there. 

12.)  Improving how the editor runs would be nice.  I'm running a fairly good computer with an i7 processors and yet the Forge can barely handle it and my computer heats up greatly when multiple objects are being used in the editor.  Finding some way to reduce the amount of memory it takes to run it would be great. 

13.)  Don't know if you can go THIS far, but giving us the ability to determine exactly where objects are placed in the gravity wells would be great.  Can understand if that's too complex though.

That's all I can think of for now, but I think that covers the important bits.  I know its been beat to death that you cannot add a Z axis so I won't even bother asking that.  Hope this list helps you determine some ares to focus on.  I will update it if I think of anything else. 

It would be nice to have maps carry over information from a previous map, in effect making the game persistent beyond the sandbox games that we have had in the single game per map style at present.

Gratuitous Space Battles did it, even if they are a 2D game.

It would be nice to have Sins have it.

Where the condition and placement of fleets, and their condition (badly damaged, 150 ships lost in battle, etc...) owned and unowned worlds are carried from one map to another.

In this way we could 'string' several maps or even dozens perhaps over many scenarios for a continuous game.

Allow map carrying to reset the 'resources' to allow players to add new ships and worlds and tech.

A substantially increased or randomized per session tech tree would be nice as well.

-Teal

No she doesn't want a true campaign, just to carry over progress already completed to the next map.

Have you ever looked at a save file?  Those things save everything.  What techs you have researched, what techs you are researching and what your progress is, what pacts you have with whom, what is in each gravity well (ships and structures for every player including pirates and neutrals), what your resource and income rates are, what all of the different AI's resource and income rates are, what you are building and it's progress, what the AI's are building and their progress, what the black market is doing, who is doing what raid wise, what the pirates are doing, what the neutrals are doing, what the relationships between each and every faction are and what is changing them, where each players culture has spread to, what ships, structures, and planets have what damage and what is currently affecting each of them...  It even saves your camera position, set hotkeys, and pinned objects in the empire window, targeting information, DPS, and the last time a specific weapon has fired...  Seriously...  These files save a lot of stuff in them...

All that would need to happen is two things.

First, utilize the current mission system to give the player objectives and force an autosave upon completion of the final objective, or give defeat upon failure due to getting wiped out or failing to complete the objectives in the allotted time.

Second, have the executable read the lines out of that forced save file upon loading of the next scenario to carry over units, research, structures, and resources that the player already has.  For example, all structures at the home planet are carried over.  All ships are carried over, or a fraction there of.  All research is carried over.  Progress on currently being built/research is discarded.  All culture data and structures at planets that are not the home planet are discarded.  Even damage of current ships and structures being carried over can also be carried over forcing you to hold up at the start and work on repairs.  Opposing factions can also have research carried over so that they aren't left behind in the technology area, but are given the standard quick start.  Hell, I'd be happy with just having research and resources carried over and everything else defaulting back to quick start levels...  You can even have the scenario read the difficulty of the AI from the forced save and add one to make them be more of a pain in the ass.

I'm not saying it's easy to implement, but the ability to do what is being asked for is already there.  This doesn't introduce a story or a true campaign, but it does do what Teal is saying and that is to be able to chain a series of maps together.

Edit:

And just so I have something on topic to say, I would have to agree about an undo button.  Maybe a better GUI for selecting planets so you're not picking out of a long list from a drop down box every time you want to change types for those of us who have mods with lots of planet types and dozens upon dozens of options for keeping up some amount of randomization in premade maps...  Also would have to agree on making the forge open source, or at least making it moddable so those of us who like to toy with things can reskin it or change up the way things are selected like adding an interface like the in game one for plopping down units and structures inside gravity wells.

Still pretty sure none of that outside your edit is going to happen Stant. Of course its possible but they would have to make that a feature of the game, not just the map files. And I'm pretty sure we'd be told if that was on the Rebellion to do list.

Ehecatl123:
1. Faction Naming: Can be done if you are willing to figure out how to add additional players to the 'autoAddplayers' section in the GSDEF file.

3. Militias seem to more often than not be the "NoPlanetOwner" than the "PlanetOwner" type.

4. Again, you can do this like Faction naming for specific maps, Distant Stars does this.

5. StarClad has to do the work on the GSDEF file. Sadly, you have to really get creative to get a starbase on planet -Distant Stars did this, but being able to plant down a starbase like you would a module would be nice.

6. Impossible as far as I know because of the severe limitations of the game like no deathmatch mode.

7. I asked for this ages ago and some muppet basically told me to lay off the pipe.  Campaigns are impossible!  You have to manually do it all.

8. Meh, who needs diplomacy when you have doomsday weapons.

10. An Undo feature?!  NO!  We must suffer for mistakes, it builds character.

13. It is too complex, bitch that auto placement seems to mean "stuff everything within a 5000 unit area".


So... my basic want.

militias that have a better chance of colonizing instead of the "NoPlanetOwner" type showing up more often.

PlanetOwnerIsPirate and PlanetOwnerIsPirateWithChance so we modders can have the group that spawns all the time, but also 3-4 groups that can spawn based on probability.  Variety is not evil -use it!

Yes, a deathmatch type of setup to set min/max tech levels, starting resources/credits, basically all the stuff I asked about in 2008.

Best thing to do for a series of maps is to make a specific template for each map that has units and modules present, but where we get screwed is in not being able to have map 0, 1, 2 set to max tech level 3 or 4, then map 3-5 max tech level 5, and so on.  We always have to start a map with 0 technology and no matter how small we can get to max tech; it sucks.

Don't worry Leuthesius, with all that hardware, the lag isn't so bad.  It's when you try to select a planet, can't, then once you do and move it only to get the dreaded exception error or wtf ever it is that nuked a map I was foolish enough not to save after 45 minutes of working on it.

It's PIMPSYS like above that scream for a 64bit executable with multicore support.

The issue is convenience.  I shouldn't need to go into a notepad to do this.  The option exists in the editor, therefore, it should perform the action required and not just... nothing.  That shows an error in the editor that needs fixed.

Again.  It still doesn't work without going into a notepad... which is the point of my post.

No, it doesn't.  It doesn't work. 

The option doesn't exist without me directly going into a notepad or downloading a player-made version of this.  I'm simply suggesting the Galaxy Forge editor be upgraded to allow easy placement of Entrenchment/Diplomacy ships/ starbases/ structures, which it should do anyway.  This is not asking a lot.

Re-read.  I'm not asking for any variant other than deathmatch. Just because its deathmatch doesn't mean it can't have a campaign feel. I'm asking for the ability to change capital ship starting levels and starbase upgrade levels.  That's not impossible at all and unless you work for Ironclad, I'd appreciate it if you didn't speak for them. 

I'm not asking for a campaign mode.  I'm asking for the editor to have the option to start certain players off at varying research levels.  I've seen no argument made as to why this cannot be done. 

Options are nice sir.  Even if you don't care for that, some of us do. 

Hah!  Indeed. Or so Ironclad would think.  

I'd let Ironclad tell me that.  I'm sure you're right but still, you're in no position to say so. 

Games like Warcraft 3 are much older and yet their editors can perform actions like this easily.  Granted, Sin's is not Warcraft 3; but what is being asked for here is not hard.  Hell, half of it is just for the damn editor to WORK as it says it does.

It does work though to my knowledge not through the editor. Some of the Celestial Bodies maps in Distant Stars force you to a specific race and unique 'non-vanilla' faction name in a 'scenario' of sorts.