A cool and (hopefully ) usefull program i wrote for space engineers :) ! Let me know what you think.

Hi !!! as my hollidays come to an end, i want to show you part of my pet project i started recently . I am making a 2d space engineers ship maker. This tool works like paint, but you can build your space ship ideas from bottom up by simply drawing blocks. the screen you see shows you many blue blocks. each blue block represents an empty block.

you can use your mouse to pint blocks. green blocks represent Large ship blocks ( the only block type
implemented at the moment ).



with the W key you can go up a layer ( meaning you increase the position of all painted blocks by 1 in the Z axis. ( although it is reversed atm . atm it decreases Z by 1, i havnt fixed that yet ). the black blocks you see show what has been drawn in the previous layer ( to make building complex ships easier).With the S key you go down a layer ( atm up a layer, since its reversed ).



with the right mouse button you can delete painted blocks. Once you are happy , you can press P and the game writes the ship data to a file.



Then you have to make a new empty world...



place 1 block...then exit to main menu ( SAVING THE WORLD !)



copy the ship data the program saved when you clicked p...and replace the data of the one block you placed with the copyed data.



Load the save



and there it is !!! I know it is quite complicated to use atm...but i will soon be able to make it write the data directly into an allready existing save ( and also add many more features if people are interested ). Since my uni starts again in a few days i wont be able to spend too much time on programming this , but i will try my best. Also if there is anyone who would like to help me PM me ( ideal would be people knowing how to program in C# using XNA , i am also looking for people good at making sprite sheets and pixel art)! Together we can make this programm awesome and usefull. Btw, once finished it will be open source. Let me know what you think

 

pretty cool and shows alot of effort on your part, although I don't really see it being all that useful (sorry) since you can easily make 2D shapes ingame without all the hassle of file editing and using a 3rd party program.

But I do have an idea on how to improve it. Would it be possible for you to reverse the process and take a ship from ingame and turn into the 2D diagram, possibly even doing multiple layers of 2D diagrams for 3D ships? That would be really useful for creating ship diagrams and schematics

 

Thanks for the reply. i think you missunderstood , you can make 3D shapes. You can draw them layer by layer. so theoretically you could make a whole ship esily by painting each layer.

 

ahh ok, I would love to see an example

But I do think that the majority of my first post still stands since it is rather difficult to turn a 3D concept in our heads into multiple 2D layers and expect to see those layers put together and resemble our concept. However if you put that process in reverse where we take a 3D object and chop it up into 2D layers it helps to better construct a mental image of the object

 

I'm with Kriegs on this - if you could reverse the process, this program would be IMMENSELY more useful.

 

Here is an example of the 3d drawing
https://imgur.com/a/1uY93

and i will work on reversing the process. shouldnt be hard . thanks for the suggestion !

 

Awesome! The first example of an out of game ship building program. Any chance you'd be willing to put the code on github? It'd be nice to get a community built editor out there for designing things out of game.

 

I'd like to see the source of the program. Unless you can mod it to work with other objects like thrusters, generators, etc. This sounds like something I could probably help with. Maybe anyway. Not sure about the language.

 

@theblackcompany
I am planning to implement the ability of placing thrusters/generators etc later ( should not be too hard ). I used C# and the XNA framework to program this ( its relatively simple to learn how to work with XNA)
i tryed to write the code so that i can easily change things later. do you have skype ?

 

Not super practical or useful, but very cool all the same. Nice work.

 

Thanks

 

It's actually pretty useful for people who prefer do design without lag and the risk of crashing. Or for really large builds like a 1:1 scale of a Super Star Destroyer Besides, if the code could be modified later to accept 3d renders of say... a Dodge Viper or the Eye of Palpatine at whopping 7600 large ship blocks long... it could be very useful.

@ShadowWithin: I have a Skype, but no microphone.

 

yeah it will be usefull for large builds ( i have to improve and add a lot of things ofcourse ).The thing with doing 3d stuff sounds hard ( i have never done anything 3d with xna) but i am sure if i just spend a bit of time i can learn how to do it .Overall i think the biggest advantage of the program is that you can edit stuff inside a ship , without having to make a hole in the hull etc. it allows you to easily change even inaccessible places and maintain an overview.<h3 style="font-size: medium; font-weight: normal; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; overflow: hidden; text-overflow: ellipsis; white-space: nowrap; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif;" class="r"> </h3>

 

where is the download?

would like to try this

/skip the necro comments

 

Very nice, I like it

 

/ maybe he is gone :bawl:.....but i found this here:

https://www.spaceengineersgame.com/communities.html


bottom of the page:

MODDING PAGES &amp; USEFUL TOOLS

Modding Community: www.se-modz.com

-------> A 2d ship maker tool created by a fan: imgur.com/a/qJIpP

 

**maybe could ask midspace?**