After chatting about this idea in Discord, it was suggested I make a write-up and put it up here.

What it all boils down to is that creating an interior of a ship is tedious and exhausting.  I'm more than capable of modelling out all the rooms, setting up jigs for doorways/windows,creating doors, creating voids, getting it all configured, etc., etc., etc.  but thought of spending that much time and effort just to get one interior designed is a bit discouraging.  Quite a few people feel the same way.  However, I am definitely not advocating removing these features, or scrapping the new editor.  Instead, I think a bit of automation could fix this up.  Add a non-destructive workflow and you've got a recipe for ship designing to be a hell of a lot more fun.

I've put together a bit of a 'mock-up' of how this could work.  This 'floorplan' tool would essentially allow players to easily create a layout of their interior, and keeping it in a non-destructive workflow so things can be moved, added, or deleted at any point.  It would control all the voids, doors, connections between rooms, etc. so all you have to worry about it what shape the rooms need to be.

This tool would be completely optional of course.  While working with this tool, the rooms you create would be 'controlled' by the floorplan tool.  As such, you cannot directly mess with the geometry of the rooms with the normal tools (but adding in extra pieces like pipes, consoles, chairs, etc. would work).  After you are happy with a layout however, it could be converted into a standard format for more in-depth customization (if so desired).

Similarly to the old designer, you would be only drawing the 'floorplan' of the design.  Rather than "painting" in grids though, you will be drawing a free-form shape on a grid (much like you would do before extruding a flat object to create something 3d).
-Each room will have a matching interior void which will change as the room is changed.
-Rooms will have a minimum distance to an adjacent room, to prevent clipping of any sort and leave room for doorways.
-Room height will be set by a 'deck height' value, which is a global design setting that can be modified.
-As in the old designer, you can work on multiple 'decks'.
-Rooms can be set to be several decks tall.
-Maybe can set rooms to be set at a mid-deck height? As long as there is some room collision 'invalidation' seems like it could be fine.




For some designs, having an easy way of drawing out hallways between rooms would be useful.  For halls, instead of drawing out the shape of the room manually, you would select a point on the walls of two rooms, creating a hall between them automatically. 
-These will remain connected even after moving a room
-All the necessary voids will be set up
-Options for adding/adjusting curvature of the hall
-These can be ramps/stairs when connecting to rooms in different decks



Doors and windows would also work similarly to the old designer (or at least attempt to). 
-Placing a door will automatically create a door connecting the adjacent room.  This is a dynamic 'door' object that can be moved/modified at will while you design.
-Windows and external doors will attempt to connect to the external hull model once finalized


Doors could have a 'shape' you assign them (for example a simple trapezoid like the below pic), with a door-frame automatically created along with doors (if you want doors that is). 
-Control panel automatically added (optional)
-Dynamic door 'width' slider for bay/cargo doors and such.




The rooms themselves of course will need some spice so they don't end up just being flat-walled boxes. Here's a mock-up of what you could see when selecting a room or hallway:




Wall Profile Editor window:





Which in a hallway would look like this:
-For halls, this applies to just the sides of the hall, where a standard room applies the shape to every side of the room.



Having some 'struts' to throw in can also spice things up.  





[url=https://imgur.com/srWLNR8][/url]

Something dies on the ship. Perhaps the carcass is inaccessible. Now an infinite cycle of rats starts to spawn and, because of the new rules, each time one appears the entire crew abandons its stations to deal with the threat (provided it dies in a room with lots of consoles).

Perhaps crewmen should compare the combined hp of the threat with the combined hp of units already responding, before deciding whether to leave their posts as well? So if a 3hp rat is being dealt with by a 38hp soldier, no one else gets involved, but if a 800hp warp monster is on the loose, everyone pitches in.


(Changing stance to defensive appears to work, but I'm not sure what effect this will have on fire control officers and turret gunners?)

Citizens Not Working
It was reported that citizens randomly seem to do no work at all.

Fixed a bug when employing/unemploying citizens.

Troops Spawn and Die
Troops appear at post points of buildings. Sometimes those posts are outside and the building is in a harsh environment. If a troop spawns there without an environment suit, it dies, then another spawns and dies, then another.

Troops no longer spawn at troop posts in a harsh environment if the town's inventory does not have a helmet and suit that will protect them.

Static Displayed Items
I clicked on an officer log on static display. Then, on the item manipulator, I clicked the button to show its detailed information. The simple window used to display the information does not scroll and the info is very long.

The item details button on the item manipulator window now uses the item inspector window, the same one that is used when you inspect an item in your inventory. That window shows the description text a lot nicer and it also includes a 3D image of the item that can be rotated and magnified.

Crew Attack Base/City Snafu
I orbited over a pirate base. My crew, in offensive posture, gleefully attacked the enemy base below. Unfortunately, they decided to destroy the HQ first. The HQ cannot be destroyed until all other military buildings are destroyed. I set them to berserk. They attacked a civilian building, which could not be destroyed due to the presence of the military buildings.

Bay weapon gunners and turret gunners no longer target buildings that cannot be destroyed due to game rules.

Pirate Bases Grow
Pirate bases were incomplete in the previous update.

Pirate bases now grow by adding more buildings. The number of buildings is limited by pirate empire difficulty. They also build some roads, to help interconnect their buildings.

Designer Bold Description
Little typo here. In designer, if you type in some description, whole remaining text will be bold

Fixed html error when formatting the description of a blueprint.

Hi guys !

What if we could set a named airport as a destination in the order menu ?
Having a simple rank access would be cool too. You could then decide if a said airport is usable by an ally empire (for example).

• Simple system, with few ranks (own empire / ally empire / all)
  
• Full rank gestion, including the above and each empire rank (+NPCs)
  

No way it could have been a month by the Mar, 18.
Two weeks, at most.

Has it really been a month since the last update? There have been many interruptions, including travel. One of those trips brought u15 back on line, a server that adds 64 CPU cores and a lot of RAM to the grid. This will be the first full server restart since then.

Pirates
Pirates do not use new style spacecraft.

Pirates received some considerable attention to improve them as a PVE game element. Rather than list a bunch of technical details, I will update the wiki on Pirates soon. Like, as soon as I am done posting this update and restart the servers.

Pirates Plunder Cryo Passengers
Pirates should plunder cryo passengers.

Pirates will now transfer cryo passenger to their ship, enough to fill their own empty cryo berths. They leave the rest.

Pirates Plunder then Attack
Pirates plunder me when I stand down but then they attack. I thought they were supposed to let me go.

Pirate captain decision making was improved. Pirates will now simply loot your ship if you stand down.

Pirate Spam
Pirates repeat the same messages over and over.

Pirates no longer repeat their messages.

Spacecraft SOS Spam
A spacecraft was crying out a fuel emergency for a really long time, like days or weeks. How could it stay alive that long?

Agent teleported to the ship. It then began falling from orbit because it had no fuel. It fell into a lava sea and was destroyed.

A bug prevented the ship in that situation from receiving any physics/movement processing. The bug was fixed.

Solar System Decay
Solar systems are not decaying as they should.

Discovered/fixed an error that caused a maintenance function on solar systems to stop being called periodically.

Stuck After Ship Self Destruct
If the ship I am aboard is destroyed, I am usually left in some strange stuck state that requires a restart of the client program. This is very annoying.

Two scene sync bugs were found and fixed. I no longer get stuck when my ship explodes.

Designer Turret Broken
I resized a turret that I copied/pasted from another design and it was broken with no way to fix it. It looked ok but, when you operated the turret from the console, the rotations were insane.

Fixed scaling effects on turret gun and base position vectors. Also fixed similar cases on other parts that store a vector, e.g. rotating beacon.

Designer Turret Base
There is a command to adjust the turret gun but not the base. Once a turret is made, the base rotation axis can never be changed. This would have helped to fix the turret broken by the previous bug.

Designer command was added, to configure the base rotation axis of the selected turret.

Say What People Loaded
It would be helpful if the designer gave some feedback when loading people in the preview.

Designer now gives feedback when people are loaded in the preview.

Path Bug
Crew whose DNA has a very low center of gravity could not find their way aboard my ship. I designed it with all the walk paths 1m above the floor.

Fixed a bug that caused creatures with a low CG to not notice when the desired path location was reached.

Designer Set My DNA
It would be useful in the designer if I could change my DNA, to insure the doors and halls work for a specific specie.

Solo designer now has a Helpers|Change My DNA command. It enables you to load your DNA from a .chr file.

To save your avatar's DNA to a .chr file, use the button on the avatar selection page, during game login.

Enemy Crew Does Not Attack
I was aboard a pirate ship. All the crew and troops were at their stations; the captain was in the command chair. Nobody attacked me. It was sort of Borg-ishly weird.

Officers, crew and troops at stations now remain alert for threats nearby. All but the pilot will leave their station to attack enemy units. This applies to all NPCs, not just pirates.

Pirate Flees to Station?
I was aboard a pirate ship in battle. The captain decided to depart the area by going to the nearest station. Oops, what station?

Changed outdated pirate commander, who was playing the old "pirate station spawns pirate ships" game. That went by the wayside a long time ago, not sure why. Pirate commander now has a much better decision making process. Pirate commander AI is still adapting to recent changes; that is, it's still a work in progress.

Pirate Scuttle
I was aboard a pirate ship in battle. As soon as the ship lit on fire, it went on red alert. Fire isn't that big of a deal. It lights easily, doesn't do that much damage very fast, and is easily extinguished using water. Unfortunately, pirate captain's were using red alert as a sign of defeat, then scuttling their ship.

Pirate officer makes a more careful assessment before deciding to hunt, flee, scuttle, etc.

Pirate Positioning
When pirates attack, the pilot decides where to position their ship relative to the target ship. In many cases, this location is out of sight of the bridge, not very Star Trek-ish.

NPC pilots now aim for a point in front of the target vessel that should usually put them in the field of view of the bridge, when executing a Plunder or Attack order. This applies to all NPC pilots, not just pirates.

Pirate Hits Shields
A pirate attacked my ship. It came screaming in, demanding I surrender, then hit my shields like a bug hitting a windshield. Poof!

Changed piloting AI to avoid shields.

Pirate Hits Own Bullets
I encountered a group of pirates. It was awesome to watch them come in, guns blazing, lighting up my shields. However, by the time they got to me, they caught up to some of their own projectiles and took considerable damage. My guys never fired and they were smoldering wrecks.

Projectiles fired from turret guns no longer hit the firing vessel, unless the firing location is inside a room of the firing vessel. NPCs do not know this so they will continue to avoid hitting their own hull when targetting their turret guns.

Energy weapon turrets are resolved instantly when fired so they are not subject to the bug. They can/will continue to hit the firing vessel.

Client Crash During Battle
A pirate was attacking my ship using rockets. My client program crashed when a rocket exploded.

Fixed a logical error exposed by an assertion failure.

any one know of a software that can open .vox and save in .3ds?

Diving in a gas giant with a submarine is very unpleasant. You can't see anything beyond 2 feet and you have no idea when you are about to collide with the bottom.

Would be nice if we could have some kind of sonar for submarines (and maybe submersible spacecraft). Render the terrain and possibly objects in wireframe, blinking in and fading out at some interval.

A proximity or collision alert. If the craft is headed towards terrain or another object, an alert could be shown on the pilot HUD. Especially for when fall damage is implemented again. Would also be useful for spacecraft.

add a options to not update the texture files for things like power suits and skins and foliage so we can customize client side