Sharing build templates - please?

[Thundercraft]

One feature that I would really appreciate - even more than sharing ships via Steam Workshop - would be the ability to easily share individual template designs with other players.

 

By "templates" I'm talking about the custom predefined shapes as found at the bottom of the Build Mode building inventory window.

 

I suppose we could share the whole "templates.xml" file. But who wants to do that? The only somewhat painless way to use someone else's templates is to replace our own "templates.xml" file, but that replaces any custom templates of our own. It's either that, or opening it up in Notepad to copy and paste the relevant sections of the code. But that is intimidating and not very convenient.

 

I reason that if it was as easy to share templates as it was ship blueprints, we'd already be seeing some players sharing their templates. But, AFAIK, that does not happen.

 

The reason I want it to be easy to share templates is because having a large library of templates makes it a lot easier to design complex and cool-looking ships and stations. I'd like to be able to have templates like conning towers, radar masts, and cargo pods, in a variety of sizes and shapes.

 

Currently, Avorion comes with only 8 very simple templates. And those are huge and only seem suitable for building stations.

[Thundercraft]

Just 18 views?

 

So, nobody else can agree that this is needed?

[Nathaniel Thorn]

I think there is a deeper problem here. As of right now, you can't easily use such templates and experiment with them.

There is no way to select large sections of the ship, move it away, put some other blocks or templates, reattach what you had, shift other stuff a bit...

 

Your idea is great and I would like very much, to get some templates from reputable shipwright to help me out creating just pale imitations of awesome creations I can see here on the forum, but lacking more tools for manipulating those, I don't know if could do much.

[koonschi]

I agree with you on having single files for each template.

 

I think there is a deeper problem here. As of right now, you can't easily use such templates and experiment with them.

There is no way to select large sections of the ship, move it away, put some other blocks or templates, reattach what you had, shift other stuff a bit...

There absolutely is. Select by drawing a rectangle, Ctrl C, Delete, do stuff, Ctrl V. Select the attach block with ALT if you've got a template selected.