BF Ship Maker



The BF Ship Maker is a separate application that allows custom ships to be created and used in the Sandbox and Skirmish modes of the game. With it, every aspect of a ship is customizable, from the hitpoints of each section to the unique handling characteristics of the ship's weapon and modules. Ships created in the BF Ship Maker can be shared with other users on the Wyrdysm Games forums. In addition to the features displayed in the campaign, ships created in BF Ship Maker can have various additional features such as moving sections and linked weapons.

Anatomy of a Ship
A ship is made out of a central core, which is the heart of a ship to which all sections are parented to, and four types of components. These components are Sections, Turrets, Modules and Doodads. Sections are parts of the structure and form the hull of the ship. Turrets are weapons mounted on sections. Modules are special turrets that provide special abilities, also mounted on sections. Doodads are graphical effects which cannot be hit in game.

Inserting components
Components can be inserted by clicking on the buttons on the left sidebar. For sections, this can also be done by pressing the Z key to bring up the selector, and then clicking on the section that you want to insert. The tilde (~) key can be used to toggle the 1/2/3/4 Keys Mode: in Insert mode, pressing the 1, 2, 3, or 4 keys will place a section, weapon, module or doodad respectively. In Group mode, it will switch between the groups of sections that are displayed in the Z selector and in the sidebar. Pushing CTRL+C with a section on the ship selected will clone that section.

Positioning components
Click on a component once to select it and once more to move it around. Click once again to drop it. CTRL clicking will allow you to cycle your selection between the sections under your mouse (i.e. if there are multiple overlapping sections in a single place). Use the J and L keys to rotate selected components. To scale sections, use I and K keys for horizontal scale, and hold the Shift key to scale vertically. To scale weapons, use the Q and A keys, again holding Shift to scale vertically. To flip components, press J and L while holding the Shift key.

Parenting
Parenting is an integral part of every ship. Components are all connected to the core through sections. If a section is destroyed, any components parented to it will be lost. Therefore, it is important to parent your sections logically, like the branches of a tree.

Whenever you place a section, it is parented to the section in your selection. Parenting can be altered at any time by selecting a section, right clicking on another section, and clicking "Set Parent". Alternatively, clicking "Reparent Children" will change the parenting of all sections parented to the currently selected section.

Depth
The way in which components of a ship are rendered is affected by their depth - the depth of a component determines whether it is on top or below other components. A larger number for depth is considered below a depth that is a smaller number, the highest number being 1 for a section that will always be on top. For example, section with depth 5 will be below section with depth 3. To change depth of selected section, use Q and A (press Shift to move it directly to the top or bottom).

Doodads are always shown above their parent section, but are otherwise hidden or cover other sections based on the depth of their parent section. Weapons and modules are by default shown above all sections and doodads, but you can toggle depthing on them by pressing W while a weapon or module is selected. This will make them behave like doodads in regards to depth. ===Color === All components can be colored according to your liking. For sections, there are team color schemes, each of them having 3 types of colors. You can change colors of a color scheme in both Battleships Forever and ShipMaker independently. For example, let's assume some sections in your ship have type 1 team color assigned, and in ShipMaker this color type is set to red, but in BSF it's set to green. Thus, in ShipMaker, these sections will appear as red, but when you load your ship into sandbox, they will be green. Apart from team colors, there are custom colors. They are the only option for weapons and modules (sections and doodads can use them too, of course), and they can be assigned only in ShipMaker. To assign colors, use the color buttons located on the sidebar. The first three buttons are the team colors, while the rest is a palette of custom colors. Simply click on the relevant button while a component is selected to assign that color to it. You can change these colors (if you modify a team color, all sections of that color will take on the new color to reflect the changes) by right clicking on the color button.