Another major milestone, the old shipbuilder is runnable enough to build new ships to run around and kill each other!  So now the NEW ships are available to be built into something.

As with such things, it showed other problems, since the Warmaster AI was trying to design ships without sufficient tech to actually make a ship able to get off the ground.  While the quick solve was to put their tech level super high and the problem went away, that isn’t the real answer, so I put something in there that it won’t let them try to design if they just don’t have the components yet.  This matters for when you, as the player, start from scratch too.

There was a problem with the ship exporter that had to be fixed since it was creating too many points, which of course tripped the shipbuilding routines, since they assume a cohesive ship.

Interestingly enough, the newer ships didn’t cause a system tank in a furrball any more than it did originally.  I suspect the issues are elsewhere, not in the to-hit calculations (not that they don’t need help) but it isn’t as terminal of a problem as I thought it would be.  I guess the real test is to try with the much higher polygon count of the cap ship and see how much that makes a difference, but I suspect it won’t make too much of one.

Ok, why no screen shots of the shipbuilder?  Because it’s still in the old ancient style.  I’m not going to fix the cosmetics of it, since the idea is to design a brand new interface.  However, this certainly shows the old autobuilder and auto-helper still work well.  Those automatically design a ship from scratch or finish filling in the missing pieces, respectively.  It is so players who don’t want to be anal about designing a ship can let the computer do it.  The auto-helper is for those that like to put in certain things, but then want the computer to do the heavy lifting for balancing thrusters and power!  I used the auto-helper to design what you see in the screen shots.  (And yes, I forgot to assign the weapon first points so they are firing from the center, oh well.  There is an auto-assigner, but I forgot to use it)

Now to build the far nicer interface!