Custom Design Folder issue

[Fenrisfil]

I've been utilising the "design" folder for a long time for a personal mod (which I may or may not release in future, but this post isn't about that), with Legends although it certainly had a lot of issues, it mostly worked. I had custom designs for tech level 5 and 7 for most of my races (and designs from tech level 3 for a number of them as well). I did this partially to guide research, but mostly as it allowed me to use alternative ship images for those classes and add some variety and visual progress.

Anyway, with Shadows I had to start from scratch as the previous design files caused an error when I tried to load them. That I can live with.

The problem is that now each individual class will only load designs if there is a viable custom design that can be constructed with the current tech level. So if I want, for example to have a custom Capital Ship at tech level 7, I have to create viable Capital Ship designs all the way down to pre-warp tech levels or else the design will be ignored (unless I start at tech level 7, but who does that?)

Strangely the carrier designs show up. I'm guessing that's because the AI can't create designs for those ships prior to them being available via research. Anyway, it's very frustrating having to create races that can make shieldless, armorless and hyperdriveless capital ships at the start of the game.

I appreciate the design templates may have made custom designs partially redundant. But it hasn't made them totally redundant as they are the only way to deviate from the standard design or provide alternate ship pictures.

[Fenrisfil]

It also seems that even if all designs load up, occasionally the game will decide to randomly drop all custom designs for one type, removing all of them (including ones at much higher tech levels that haven't been used yet) and reverting to AI generated designs. Utterly bizarre. Usually this happens to a couple of ship types but not all, so you randomly find a chunk of your custom designs missing.

Is this feature even being supported anymore?

[Fenrisfil]

It seems that to avoid your designs disappearing you have to make sure those design classes are unticked in the policy so the AI cannot try and design any. The next problem is of course the fact that you need to have designs down to tech level 0 and if you intend these custom designs to be available to AI races you need to tweak them for the AI's sometimes bizarre research objectives. For example, it seems the AI has some kind of phobia for targeting technology and will avoid researching it until at least after it has researched stealth (and then only if you've set targeting as a policy design choice). The AI does however seem fairly consistent, so the only way to get the designs is to run a test game on complete automation and tweak the custom ship designs when they are close.

This all takes a lot of work, so I guess I understand why I seem to be the only Distant Worlds player in the entire universe that tries to use this feature. Which is a shame because it is a potentially very powerful feature for modders, but has always been plagued with issues and seems to have gotten worse since Shadows was introduced.

[elliotg]

Hi Fenrisfil

Thanks for your feedback on this.

While we have not removed this feature from Shadows (and tried not to deliberately break it [:)]) the recommended approach in Shadows is to instead use the new design template files.

Thanks
Elliot

[Fenrisfil]

Thanks for the reply elliotg. I do like the design templates and aside from a few issues (most notably ignoring things like the mega density fuel cell and a few other unique techs) I've found it very useful, unfortunately however the one thing that the templates don't allow me to do is to change the ship picture. You see my mod includes a number of races that have additional ship images and the normal designs folder allowed me to advance these images as the races technology developed. By the last Legends update it was working very well and it was wonderful seeing AI races move through their ships era's. With Shadows I had to re-do all the designs, which I didn't really mind but then I came across this issue.

On the other hand, forcing me to do designs down to pre-warp level has encouraged me to find a number of excellent pre-warp looking ship images for that stage (like space shuttles and 40s sci-fi rockets), so it's not all bad!