Hello everyone! This week, I wanted to talk to you all about the GalCiv IV’s Ship Designer.
As a feature, the Ship Designer allows players to do two important things:
- Create custom ships specially tailored to their needs
- Create really, really cool designs
In this Dev Journal, I am going to focus on the latter.
As you might guess from my username, I am a big fan of all things dragons - therefore, it should come as no surprise that the Drath are my favorite civilization.
And so, I would like to walk you through how I went about creating my new Drath ship, the ExoDragon.
The first step in creating a new ship design is opening the Ship Designer.
The Ship Designer can be found in the Main Menu left of the Workshop, Language, and Options buttons.
You can also access the Ship Designer mid-game from any Shipyard though options like Components and Operation Abilities will be limited by your current Technology.
Before fully launching the Ship Designer, you will be prompted to select Ship Style, Ship Colors, Sub Surface Textures, and Material Modifiers.
“Ship Style” refers to the “set” of Ship Designs used by each civilization - in this case, the Drath Ship Style is used by the Drath. Completed designs get added to the selected “set” and made available to any civilization using that Style.
Ship Colors, Sub Surface Textures, and Material Modifiers are not saved with any completed design but instead applied to all ships according to the current Civilization. Players can change these settings later while creating/editing a custom Civilization or setting up a new game.
An easy way to find what Sub Surface Textures and Material Modifiers a Civilization uses by default is to make a copy of that Civilization, edit it, and navigate to the “Fleets” tab of that Civilization. For your convenience, however, I’ve assembled them all into one easy table!
By setting these options in the Ship Designer, we can get a better understanding of how each design will look in-game.
For this endeavor, I was designing a ship for the Drath, so I chose the Drath Style and changed the rest to match the default Drath settings:
- Drath Ship Color
- Scales and Orange Peel Subsurface Materials
- Metallic (Bright Lights) and Low Reflectivity (Bright Lights) Material Modifiers
With this out of the way, I launched the Designer.
After launching the Designer, I opted to get the ball rolling by creating a New Ship Class instead of choosing to Edit an existing design. This was because, for my purposes, I wanted a blank canvas.
Next, I chose to leave the Ship Type as “Unclassified.”
By making this choice, I avoided locking my design into a specific role. For reference, selecting “Flag” would have attached a Flag Module, “Colony” a Colony Module, and so on. An Unclassified ship with none of these Components can later be copied and edited to be any ship under the sun.
With the ship type selected, I was free to “Start New Design” and enter the Designer proper!
Now it was time to get started… almost.
Before I set off on creating a Dragon, I needed to set the stage.
The first step of my preparations was choosing a Hull. For a new Design made from scratch, it’s important to select a Hull as a Hull determines your ship’s Capacity for components and when it can be unlocked.
Hull Capacities are as follows:
- Tiny = 8
- Small = 18
- Medium = 32
- Large = 60
- Huge = 100
- Cargo = 20 (for non-combat ships)
I opted for a Large Hull for this design.
Next, I added a Hexagon the size of a standard tile for reference. To do so, I navigated to the Cosmetic Pieces and sorted by Style. The Hexagon piece appears near the top.
Once selected, I held CTRL + Shift and clicked anywhere within the viewport - snapping the Hexagon to the center/origin/root of the scene.
Lastly, I ensured that I had Advanced Edit Mode and Design Gizmos enabled (personal preference). I found these options at the bottom of the screen next to the animation toggle buttons.
With that out of the way, it was time to start creating!
I wanted my dragon to feel more “organic” than the usual Gal Civ spaceship, so I decided to start my search for parts with the Festron. Their carapace-y pieces looked appropriately draconic with the Scales Sub Surface Texture which was exactly what I wanted.
I started the design by chaining a handful of these pieces together slightly scaled down and tapering out to create the body.
Along the way, I adjusted each piece using the control panel on the bottom right-hand side. Often, using the scroll wheel while hovering over an individual slider offers precision that can be hard to achieve by hand.
Once I had my base, I switched focus to creating natural-looking movements.
Starting at the “neck” I used the animation tool to create an Oscillating Rotation on the X and Y axis of each section.
The Ship Designer’s animation tools allow you to edit and animate rotation, offset/motion, and scale. For animation, each of these attributes is animated in a loop where you the designer can control the speed and adjustment.
By default, animating Rotation spins each piece around a specified axis but by ticking oscillation, I achieved the motion I was after.
By oscillating ~30 degrees in either direction on the X and Y axis, I made the dragon “look” left then right, up, and then down. By halving the speed of the left-right motion, I gave it the appearance of “looking around” in an organic fashion.
With these motions repeated for each section of the body, my dragon was moving!
One more useful tip: to reset all animation, hit the pause button and then add any piece. Doing so will return the animation to neutral.
My next step was developing the head. For the head, I drew from a handful of different styles - most notably the Festron, Iconian, DLC, and Altarian styles.
Important to note is that I did not use the Mirroring toggle on the control panel for any of these parts. Normally, designers would want to “Mirror” parts like wings across their designs to halve the time they spend attaching them.
This technique would not work for my dragon as Mirroring in the Ship Designer happens across central axes and is not based on the piece the mirrored object is attached to.
A mirrored horn would end up floating away from the head when it looks to one side or another which I wanted to avoid.
Instead, I utilized the Flip toggles on the control panel to match each duplicate part accurately.
As I continued, I added Iconian-style wings and “eyes” using the Basic Light 005 piece. I gave each wing slight “stretching” and “dipping” movements, exaggerated by the preexisting movement of the body.
Nearly done, I added and animated two arms with grasping claws and removed the reference Hexagon.
Lastly, I did one more pass I chose certain pieces of my dragon where I wanted to Invert the material - switching the Primary and Secondary colors and styles.
With that complete, my dragon was finished!
I took a quick moment to capture some screenshots.
With the black background toggled (found next to the animation buttons at the bottom of the screen), I used the “Print Screen” button on my keyboard to take screenshots with transparent backgrounds. I was then able to retrieve these photos from my GalCiv4>ScreenShots folder.
With that, I saved the design with the temporary name of DragonShip_01.
Once saved, you can find your designs in your list of available designs for that Style. With any of these selected, you can hit the edit button and return to make adjustments, add components, and so on!
As an example, you may want to download the ExoDragon for yourself and equip it with some powerful Beam Weapons like the Disruptor Pulse Array or Doom Ray.
By going in and editing the design, you can do just that! You can even hide these components (or any piece you choose) if you want the effect but don’t care for the appearance.
From here, customize to your heart's content! Though be aware of each part's Mass and manufacturing time.
One more thing to be aware of is that your custom ship designs are available to the AI as well as yourself so don’t be surprised if you spot your ships prowling the galaxy!
To wrap everything up, I’d like to thank you for reading and encourage you to share your own designs on the Gal Civ IV Steam Workshop!
All you need to do is click “Upload Design,” give it a name and description, and send it on its way.
I’ve had a blast designing the ExoDragon but most of all, I’m excited to see what you create!