The Gratuitous Space Battles hull editor is a VERY ROUGH editor that was never intended to be released to anyone, without a substantial re-write. However, because a number of people have got into modding extra ships into the game, and because doing so can be very time consuming just using text files, I present a VERY rough guide to the UNSUPPORTED ship editor in the game.

You can enable the ship editor as a new main menu option by adding a '-editor' command line option to the game, if you have version 1.39 or later. You will see a new 'Hull Editor' option at the far right.

The editor lets you load in existing hulls, and save them out. The buttons at the top do this. Note that the editor saves them out in a new subfolder under \data\hulls called 'new'. Don't forget to copy them back, or rename them afterwards.

There are basically four sections to the editor, the display modes, the editor modes, the editor details and the preview window.

These are the three buttons at the top left, for Sprite,Damage and Hulk. These display the 3 different images for the current selected ship. Obviously you want to look at the damage texture when editing damage data etc...

These are the lower 6 buttons. Each toggles the editor into a different mode and will activate different options on the far right of the screen.

This is the far right winow, which changes depending on what is selected. Each mode works a different way...

The standard and smoke buttons toggle between mouse click-placement of new emmiters of the two types (color coded) Blue sparks is unused. The Hulks button switches to editing the defined rectangles which are seperate hulk sections. Right clicking deletes a section, click and drag to add one.

Shows and allows editing of ship slots. Click and drag slots to move them. You can toggle between turret and normal on the active slot. You can right-click to delete. The toggle mode lets you edit hardpoints. Right click deletes them, left click adds one for the currently selected and highlighted module.

The U key will toggle some interface bits on and off here. you can drag to select and place new damage texture areas, move the offsets within an area that act as the target point, place spark or smoke emmiters inside damage areas. If you click select damage and then highlight an area, you can toggle its 'permenant' emmiter using the tempname button.

One button turns off the squares that highlight the running lights. Click a light (or add a new one) to see the options for speed, color and size.

Click and drag to move, you can edit dimensions and type using the buttons and sliders

Shows all the events associated with a hull when it finally explodes. You can reposition where each event takes place by selecting it on the right, then dragging its highlighted icon to a new position.