There's number of things occuring and while I know a few things are certainly bugs, some might just be the designer being counter-intuitive. You can let me know if the majority of this is just me being disappointed with the designer. I've only really spent time on the Terran parts.
The bug:
- Terran Model 33 (an elbow-shaped piece) places a wing part that looks nothing like it. I can't find the wing it ends up placing anywhere in the parts list, and no other part places what Terran Model 33 depicts. I'd embed some images but neither my dropbox nor steam screenshots are being displayed. But maybe you can see them:
Might be a bug?
- There are no design parts "Terran Model 125" - Terran Model 130" while the numbering goes up to 131. #'s 125-130 are listed as Light 1-5, and the skull thing.
- Depending on camera angle, even in situations the camera isn't oblique at all, the offset function will be super sensitive, making it really difficult to get anything other than 50.0 or -50.0. I've only noticed this happening along the X (red) axis.
- When using any of the gizmos the direction you have to pull the mouse can be really bizarre. For example, with the camera at right angles to the Y axis, I want to move a part upwards. I press down and then....move the mouse to the right or left to get the piece to go up or down. If I try dragging in the direction I want its response is only lukewarm, usually just jitters a little, will sometimes move a little but then move back the way it came if I continue pulling in a straight line. Or I have to drag left to move the piece right.
Probably not a bug, just annoying/really inconvenient?
- When sorting by type, the Thruster category is populated with only one model, other obvious candidates notwithstanding. The included one is called "Particle Thruster" while all the non-included candidates are "Terran Model #."
- The offset axes are relative to the hardpoint, meaning e.g. a positive Y value is sometimes downwards, sometimes to the right, sometimes toward the stern, etc.
- I can't ctrl-select parts that aren't linked via hard-mount without said linking part also being selected. So, e.g. I can't scale all thrusters at the same time without messing other stuff up.
- I can group parts together and then modify them in bulk, but if I ungroup later to just modify one part, they all return to pre-grouped status.
- Once you've mirrored a part every part mounted onto the mirrored one must be mirrored. Depending on the ship I'm designing it can be quite difficult to select a hard-mount so I can place something I don't want to be symmetrical.
- Is there really no way to change the hard-mount of a placed piece so that you can delete just the piece they were attached to without starting all over?
A few days ago I had Steam verify the integrity of the game cache and it had to download five files. I continued to see all the above bugs/not-bugs. Just before I began writing this I re-verified and needed to download 8 files. Below are the bugs (well, not really) that were fixed by verifying and redownloading:
- The color coding on the design gizmos usually does not agree with the axis color-coding on the design palette.
- The space where the pointer has to be to utilize the rotation gizmo is often nowhere near, nor constantly displaced to the same relative location, where the colored bands are located. This occurs more frequently (maybe only) when I already used the flip options on the piece. Unflipping will make them easy to rotate again.
- The first attempt to rescale a newly-selected piece along one axis which has had proportional scaling turned off would sometimes try to scale the piece proportionally.
- Terran Model 108 was placing the wrong model.
- Some pieces wouldn't invert their coloring scheme
Also, galciv.wikia.com mentions that the ship designer has keybindings 1-4 for camera angles and + - for zooming, but neither the official wiki, nor the in-game input menu mentions them. Is there no way to get a perfect 90 degree angle on your ship? I know there's C but that gives an isometric perspective.
EDIT: After writing this post I exited the game and re-verified. Eight files needed to be redownloaded. I restarted the game and exited as soon as i hit the main menu. Eight files needed to be redownloaded. So it looks like theses files are being regularly corrupted/deleted/misidentified/whatever whenever the game boots up. I am running Windows 10. Also, when Steam validates, it validates "Galactic Civilizatons III file (1 of 1)"; not sure if this is normal.