Read by Schine Turret placement improvment

[nemovonutopia]

Placing many turrets on a ship is my least favorite part of the game, taking a lot of time traveling between the ship and where the turrets spawned in. I've created ships to carry groups of turrets close to my ship but that is still time consuming so I was thinking about an easier way and I've come up with a possible solution:

Add a tool or new option that will spawn a turret from a blueprint directly on a turret docker block.

 

[friendofvampires]

This would be useful, though i'm not sure how it would be coded. a turret can have multiple dock points

 

[kiraen]

Or just have things spawn next to you instead of on the other side of the sector. That would be nice.

 

[jayman38]

It would be pretty simple to code, really. Draw a ray from the buyer/spawner. If the ray intersects a rail block and if the entity being spawned or bought has at least one unoccupied rail docker, spawn in the entity with the first available rail docker aligned and docked to the intersected rail block. It might take a couple of seconds to get it in place (edit: due to intersection/interference checks), but imagine the huge amounts of time spent manually docking that would be saved with such a change.

Even if the entity (turret) is attached at the wrong rail docker, at least it's right there for you to undock and manually dock it with precision.

 

[Crusade]

If you have admin powers, f-target the turret base and hit tab+f8. It'll put you in the turret no matter the distance.

 

[Planr]

Having turrets automatically added to your ship when its built in a shipyard would be nice to have in the upcoming shipyard update. Or when you lose a turret or it gets damaged, the shipyard repairs it when you bring the ship in for repairs as well.

 

[Lenier]

Thinking about what Kiraen had said. Instead of the game deciding where your ship goes, have it show a ghost image of the ship in front of the user. The user moves around and scrolls in and out to place the ghost image and then clicks. If at any point the user looks at a dock/rail then the ghost image can automatically snap onto the dock there, and when the user clicks the turret will spawn in already docked. If the ship ever cant fit in a spot, then the system will not let the user click there. Am I missing something?

Hmm. Are ship templates saved with turrets? That would also be nice.

 

[nemovonutopia]

thanks for the tab+f8 tip, its made things a bit easier.

Templates are saved with turrets so I've started saving the base of the turret to the catalog which will include the base and the barrel.

 

[StormWing0]

thanks for the tab+f8 tip, its made things a bit easier.

Templates are saved with turrets so I've started saving the base of the turret to the catalog which will include the base and the barrel.

Tab + F8 may be fast but it would be nice to just spawn it docked with a specific docker used by both entities too since most servers we can't pull this trick on.

It does make it easier though.

 

[Valiant70]

Don't forget about the shipyard update! There won't be any "blueprint spawning" as we know it. As I understand, build mode will be a sort of "creative mode" without any blocks, strictly for creating blueprints. (Perhaps we should call it "design mode" instead to avoid confusion.) Blueprints will be "spawned" (constructed) by shipyard machines. Thus, we should be discussing a way to add turrets to a virtual ship in design mode. I believe this is feature will be very, very necessary.

So, rather like the OP suggested, one should target a turret axis block and select a blueprint. The simplest way to do this would be to select a blueprint from the player's inventory and spawn a copy of it in design mode.