Construction MODS (Oh yes, you can get a bigger edit zone and custom block colors!)

[AmbitiousButRubbish]

So, iv'e been looking around the game files for the past few days, it seems that each island has a few definitions in an XML file.

The part that matters here falls under the

<edit_areas>

tag.

Each siland has its own XML file that contains information regarding the definitions of island physics, edit zones, workbenches, lights etc...
Since none of this is hardcoded into the engine, editing the XML file actually changes what you can do on an island. Its more than possible to add 2 hangars to the crateive spawn island if you wanted, just need to learn how the different parts of the XML file link together (logic nodes etc...)

HOW THIS WORKS

• XML definitions are located at: <installLocation>\Steam\steamapps\common\Stormworks\rom\data\tiles
  

• The main creative island is 'island_15.xml

• open the XML file in an editor, my preference is Notepad++, but you can use whatever you want, and scroll untill you see the <edit_areas> tag.

this is the edit area with id=edit1 ) by changing the values in the <size> tag.
you will also need to set the grid size to '0' in the same tag for the size to change

UPDATE

seeing as not everyone understands how this works....

• Follow the instructions above
  
• Find the workbench marked as 'edit1' and change the values in the <size> tag, don't know what the maximum is, you will need to make reasonably large changes for it to be noticable
  thats it....
  
  
  I'm going to keep experimenting, so will post more here when i find anything else.
  
  

  This doesn't apply any more since we can do this anyway

  GET CUSTOM PAINT COLORS

  
  If people actuallky do this, im going to be amazed, because ireally cant be botherd to go through the blueprint files changeing EVERY SINGLE COLOR.
  But, if you want to, blueprints are located at: C:\Users\<UserName>\AppData\Roaming\Stormworks\data\vehicles
  
  in the XML file, there is an entry for EVERY SINGLE BLOCK on the ship, which is terribly inefficient, but is a brute force way of making save files. Each block has a few options, position and color, in tags starting with:
  <C> - This is the block type
  <O> - this is something to do with the block colors
  <vp> - this is the XYZ location of the block
  Iv'e not looked into this as much as the edit zones, so i'd assume this all works fine.
  
  Oh and an additional note, blocks arent hardcoded either, so if you want custom blocks, look under rom\definitions in the game folder... im not explaining this sorry.

[AmbitiousButRubbish]

ah, right, ok, so the stuff ive postes is for creative, island_15 is the creative spawn, im not sure what the career spawn island is, but im certain that island_15 DOES NOT SPAWN in career.

In terms of sizing of spawn areas, im not sure how the size is calculated, i'd assume its meters, and since these can be decimals, i guess they are only using 1 byte for the value before the decimal point, because, i guess that there should be no reason for a larger area, since the Devs werent planning for larger ships of the magnitude you are talking about.

thanks anyway for the additional information, since it helps anyone else reading this.

also, X Z Y makes sense, sicne certain 3d modelling software (especially blender) uses this layout, and maybe its easier for the devs to implement it this way, and their engine probably works better that way.

[FCW218]

Feels good to be part of a solution doesn't it :) I really hope the devs make it possible to build huge ships. When I say huge (for you devs reading this) I mean it should be possible to build the biggest ship in the world currently Seawise Giant (along with other names it had later).
Same thing with planes and submarines and what not. I guess I think there shouldn't be a limit. I know the devs would have to set one for coding purposes. They should set it so big it would not interfere with anybody building anything. They should also fix the calcs they use. Should be based on displacement and buoyancy not just how buoyant a closed container is.
Anyway, ranting now. Thank you for the help

[TMC Christian]

Originally posted by AmbitiousButRubbish:

Ok, So, just did more testing, heres what iv'e found:

YOU CAN MAKE THE SHIP EDIT ZONE BIGGER

• got to the area in the XML as specified as above, and input your new size values for 'edit1', ive used X = 52.5 Y = 50.5 and Z = 107.5
  
• START A NEW GAME

it seems the numbers just had to be substantially larger for this to be visible!

voila, you now have a bigger edit area!
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1432020121

So I just stumbled upon this post and this is exactly what I've been wanting for months now. I went into the .xml file and changed the build area to be the sizes you put here. It had NO effect ingame, so I read further and saw someone mention that you need to change: grid_size="2" to grid_size="0". I did that and it works! The editor size is about twice as large now.

However, spawning certain vehicles inside the edit zone causes the vehicles to have a physics melt down and the ships will literally go spinning and flying into the air and they won't stop spinning and flying around.

I tried shifting the edit area south just incase the engine was doing it based off of some sort of terrain collision, but no matter where I shift the edit area, certain vehicles will still go flying and spinning as soon as they spawn.

I say certain vehicles because it's not every vehicle. It doesn't matter how large or how small they are, some go flying and some don't. All of the vehicles work fine if I swap back in the original island_15.xml file. I have no idea what's triggering it. I can't seem to find anything tell-tale in common with the affected vehicles.

Do you have any idea what could be causing this or what I can do?

[FCW218]

lol yeah that was me. Took me a few nights to figure that grid thing out. I've built a ship to scale in my model at 418' long. Which is as long as can be built currently within the model at 511 blocks long. I was trying to spawn said vehicle for testing for the first time. I can't spawn the vehicle. I'd spawn into the game but have a message top left saying loading vehicle and it stayed like this indefinitely. Tried closing game, restarting computer. Then I couldn't load into creative mode. Would load into home screen. Click load game. Percentage bottom right would go to 100%. Then go away. Then message at top left saying spawning and a black screen and it just sat like that. After finding an older save for that file and reloading I got the creative save back. It pulled from the autosave for the ship save so I didn't lose anything. Now I'm afraid to try and spawn it again lol.
I've seen a fair amount of what you are referring to with the ships spinning out of control and what not. Something would have to be causing a collision for that to happen. My best guess would be the bottom of the edit area box is going through the ground below the sea level. I'd try moving the box up so bottom of edit box is touching sea level.

[AmbitiousButRubbish]

Make sure you set the grid size to 0, i didnt mention that in the initial post, annd obviously, changing the height too much causes ships to spawn in the ground and have physics glitches.
but you can move the spawn area, though ive not experimented with that.

[TMC Christian]

Originally posted by FCW218:

lol yeah that was me. Took me a few nights to figure that grid thing out. I've built a ship to scale in my model at 418' long. Which is as long as can be built currently within the model at 511 blocks long.

At 418', it's a safe bet to say you're building a National Security Cutter, which happens to be what I'm working on as well.

I eventually realized that even though my model wasn't clipping the ground, the build area was which still rendered a collision for some reason. After raising the build area, I don't have any issues anymore.

[FCW218]

That's what I meant was to move the bottom of the box above the ground and water area. Floating box if you will. So moving your spawn area up fixed the glitches with ships? That's good to hear if it did. Glad to help out. I'm not sure what's going on with my ship. I've seen some other people's ships that are just as big and they seem to spawn fine. I know the program is 32bit (Unfortunately) and maybe "running" out of memory and therefor paging to hard drive? Would be odd considering the program is small to begin with. I have 16GB so no problem there. I have 1080 TI so that's not it. Can't figure it out. Any ideas?

[AmbitiousButRubbish]

Originally posted by FCW218:

That's what I meant was to move the bottom of the box above the ground and water area. Floating box if you will. So moving your spawn area up fixed the glitches with ships? That's good to hear if it did. Glad to help out. I'm not sure what's going on with my ship. I've seen some other people's ships that are just as big and they seem to spawn fine. I know the program is 32bit (Unfortunately) and maybe "running" out of memory and therefor paging to hard drive? Would be odd considering the program is small to begin with. I have 16GB so no problem there. I have 1080 TI so that's not it. Can't figure it out. Any ideas?

th game doesnt seem to be very good at handling larger and more complex ships, also, a 32bit program can ONLY access 4GB RAM, the OS handles paging, as far as the program running is concerned, it is alwayus using RAM despite the fact the OS could be putting its RAM 'pages' on the HDD, no program has access to the physical ram, rather a remapped virtual address space supplied to it by the OS, the OS then maps these virtual addresses to physical addresses, be it on the HDD or the RAM.

could be your CPU? cant handle the larger ships on one thread (im pretty sure this game doesnt care how many cores you have... sucks for me on an R7 1700)
maybe give the game a bit of time to load stuff in before trying to spawn the ship?

[FCW218]

I have 3930k I over clocked at 4.8GHZ...lol Takes massive cooling but it works. I had it at 5.2GHZ at one point but it got stupidly hot even with a 360 x 140 radiator liquid. I originally built my machine in 2013. That was the best available at the time. I don't think it's the CPU though. Runs way more complex stuff...like X-plane 11...just stupid hard to render...doesn't take long to load things though. Stuff renders in less than 2 seconds at most in stormworks in any situation. I always buy the best I can at the time I build and run it forever. Often times I out perform everything at least 3-5 years after a build. The extra dollars are worth it.
But yeah, idk what the program is attempting to do when I click spawn

[AmbitiousButRubbish]

I guess, just remember it's in early access, there will be issues, FPS is my issue, I've got an R9 380 and can't get over 30fps, and it drops massively with even a small ship spawned, I've got a laptop with a 1070 and it runs it at 60fps even when there are ships spawned, so I guess bugs and optimisation need ironing out, give the game a few updates throug and it may load stuff.

I've had a few issue switch ships.not loading Inthe past, not sure what causes it, one minute they load, I make a few changes, try to load it and the game crashes every time, it could be the save XML getting currupted for the ship, but, just a guess.

[TMC Christian]

Originally posted by AmbitiousButRubbish:

I guess, just remember it's in early access, there will be issues, FPS is my issue, I've got an R9 380 and can't get over 30fps, and it drops massively with even a small ship spawned, I've got a laptop with a 1070 and it runs it at 60fps even when there are ships spawned, so I guess bugs and optimisation need ironing out, give the game a few updates throug and it may load stuff.

I've had a few issue switch ships.not loading Inthe past, not sure what causes it, one minute they load, I make a few changes, try to load it and the game crashes every time, it could be the save XML getting currupted for the ship, but, just a guess.

I'd wager that having AMD is your issue. Before I joined the Coast Guard, I was running an HD8350 CPU with an R9 390 and 16gigs of DDR5 ram, which was a pretty damn good rig by AMD standards at the time. I couldn't get a decent framerate in anything to save my life.

Last year I did a full rebuild to an i7-7700k with a GTX 1080 FE. I got anywhere from 5x to 30x better framerates in every single game I played, and the rigs were pretty equivalent on paper as far as stats go. For example, trying to play Squad on my old rig, my framerate was between 6 and 25 frames on the lowest settings. Once I upgraded, I get anywhere from 50 and 144 frames on max settings depending on what's going on.

As far as Stormworks go, the game seems to use only 1 core of the CPU for rendering physics which is terribly inefficient, but I could be wrong about that. Hopefully as time goes on, they'll figure out their engine and these issues will be ironed out.

[AmbitiousButRubbish]

Originally posted by TMC Christian:

Originally posted by AmbitiousButRubbish:

I guess, just remember it's in early access, there will be issues, FPS is my issue, I've got an R9 380 and can't get over 30fps, and it drops massively with even a small ship spawned, I've got a laptop with a 1070 and it runs it at 60fps even when there are ships spawned, so I guess bugs and optimisation need ironing out, give the game a few updates throug and it may load stuff.

I've had a few issue switch ships.not loading Inthe past, not sure what causes it, one minute they load, I make a few changes, try to load it and the game crashes every time, it could be the save XML getting currupted for the ship, but, just a guess.

I'd wager that having AMD is your issue. Before I joined the Coast Guard, I was running an HD8350 CPU with an R9 390 and 16gigs of DDR5 ram, which was a pretty damn good rig by AMD standards at the time. I couldn't get a decent framerate in anything to save my life.

Last year I did a full rebuild to an i7-7700k with a GTX 1080 FE. I got anywhere from 5x to 30x better framerates in every single game I played, and the rigs were pretty equivalent on paper as far as stats go. For example, trying to play Squad on my old rig, my framerate was between 6 and 25 frames on the lowest settings. Once I upgraded, I get anywhere from 50 and 144 frames on max settings depending on what's going on.

As far as Stormworks go, the game seems to use only 1 core of the CPU for rendering physics which is terribly inefficient, but I could be wrong about that. Hopefully as time goes on, they'll figure out their engine and these issues will be ironed out.

lets not start bashing AMD and intel here, as far as current gen stuff is concerned, ryzen and 8th gen intel stuff perform on par, the R9 380 for its time was a rival for the GTX 970. I'll also add, ive got an intel gaming laptop with an i7 8850h and GTX 1070, so im no fan either way, i just go for what hurts my wallet less.

but on a serious note, optimisation is something that should be considered, since i seem to get far more consistant performance on my intel system, most likely due to the GPU, since the game renders using openGL, AMD should theoretically perform better than nvidia, all depends on the development systems that the devs are using, if they are souly nvidia systems that, i expect the game to run better on nvidia hardware.

[Abyss]

So how does one figure out which file goes to which tile? Or can someone help me fine the file for the mainland dock, file and location in file of the dock? I need to have a wider ship than the creative dock will allow, and I don't want to mess with <transform>

[FCW218]

I’m not sure how to pin point which island is which file. Outside of changing all of them at once and seeing what happens. Perhaps Rubbish can chime in to how he or she found out the default island is file 15. Which giving the amount of updates we’ve seen since Rubbish and I figured all this out, may have changed. But I don’t think it has. Probably just added more files and with more and new numbers.
Rubbish could you say how you found it was file 15? Someone tell you where it was? You found it yourself? Sorry it took awhile to reply

[AmbitiousButRubbish]

FCW218, mainly through trial and error, also, through identifying that there were 2 edit zones, and the sizes of them, the hangar edit zone is as far as im aware one of only 2 areas with edit zones of its size, and its fairly obvious looking through the files what edit zone is the hangar, subsequently, since there are only 2 islands with the hangar on them in the game, and one of them doesnt have any other edit zones, the island with 3 edit zones (yep, becasue the crane also exists in an edit zone) is the creative island, i'll check to see if things have changed, but i doubt it

Ultimately, it was just trial and error, i could narrow the search down a bit, and from looking through other islands, i became familiar with the XML structure for edit zones, and knew i was looking for an island that had an edit zone with a default vehicle, so i started from island 1, in notepad++, ctrl+F'ing the default vehicle string, obviously i didnt know the name of the default vehicle, but i knew it would be an abitary length character string, so a regular expression could be used in its place, and i eventually came accross

default_vehicle="ultimate_crane"

, which told me that island 15 was the creative island as no other had a crane on it, or if it did, certainly not an 'ultimate crane'

-- UPDATE --
Just checked the files, island 15 is still the creative island, and although it has changed, it is confirmed by the string

default_vehicle="ultimate_crane"

in one of the edit zones