Using the Ship Designer with custom civilization

from GalCiv3 Forums

Hey folks.

So, got a tiny problem with the ship designer. The one that you choose from the main menu.

See below, I have picked a custom set of colours for my civ's ships. (Sorry, if the screenshot is huge)

 

 

When I go to the ship designer, I can't pick my custom civ's ship colours from a menu. I can only pick the defaults.

 

The problem with this, is, if I design a new ship in the main menu Ship Designer, it's not going to use my custom civ's ship palette. This means that I'm not going to know what it really looks like until I'm playing a game.

18,160 views 3 replies
Reply #1 from GalCiv3 Forums Top

Yeah welcome to the ingame tools :) xml ftw.

Reply #2 from GalCiv3 Forums Top

Seems like what I did way back when I created the civ, was use the Terran Inverted palette as a starting point and then pick my own colours. Through a bit of trial and error, I managed to put together an XML mod which adds my custom palette.

The first hitch was that the default 'Diffuse Gradient' colour palette has a big ol' gap. Simply counting to where your desired colour is in-game won't work past a certain point. Opening up the palette in GIMP gave me a vague idea of which colour might match... nope, I was off by 3, but, hey, that's okay, fixed that. Similar story with the 'Light Gradient' palette.

Anyway, the second problem that I found was that the 'Surface Scale' and 'Surface Weight' didn't match what I originally picked out. After a bit of tedious in-game switching of palettes I found that the Terran Inverted palette matched except for the colours, so it must have been the one which I used as a base. So, I copied the values for that palette over and, sure enough, when I loaded up one last time, I had a 100% match.

Still have to pick out Painted Metal and Adamantium 01 when I go into the Ship Designer. But hey, progress.

Galactic Civilizations IV
Reply #3 from GalCiv3 Forums Top

The only "easy" solution would be to add the possibility to save and/or export your custom palette (but honestly I don't know if the devs can add such feature).