Having an option to save a subassembly as one part would be pretty helpful in reducing part counts. Here is the initial idea:
-saving airline sections as one part (as one part)
-saving custom missiles (as one part)
-Cockpits
-etc.
So, you might have noticed that I didn't include things like rotators, engines, etc. this would make people not to be able to save whole planes as one part because including these might make things more complicated, and may not work properly.
I'm not quite sure how to further explain this idea... so.. yea :3
Man that's not how it works, the game can't just take a bunch of parts, combine them into one and have every single part still work the same as before.
What if i combine a wing and a fuselage? How does the game know where the wing ends and the fuselage starts if it's all the same part? Plus, even if the game could somehow combine the parts without getting rid of their properties, it would still have to calculate every part individually, making the feature worthless.
And that's not even accounting for the models, while a jet canopy built with 15 parts may look like a connected, smooth shape to you, the game still sees that as 15 individual parts with very specific positions. How would it know what the combined part would look like? And how would it create a 3d model on the fly for it? Seems like a cool idea in theory, but won't work in practice.
Make sense here. Especially for single bodies with large numbers of parts, simply combining all these into a single 3D model would be cool.
@DeveloperKorzalerke yea..
@IceCraftGaming I doubt it would be a very useful feature since it would have so many limitations, the performance impact would probably not be very high either since, as wnp mentioned, the game already combines the physics processing for certain parts so i don't really see the point of adding this.
@DeveloperKorzalerke exactly, only items in the "structure" tab except for the wing will work
@WNP78 👍
@IceCraftGaming no, it does not use the subassembly system, it automatically combines parts at all times, behind the scenes.
@WNP78 oh so thats why connecting stuff with detachers and rotators makes them break off separately and not destroy the whole plane
Yandere Dev code moment
@WNP78 so I'm guessing this means that if you save a part to subassemblies and use it, it would greatly reduce performance cost?
in terms of "reducing part counts" SP pretty much already does this behind the scenes. Parts that don't have rotators, detachers or other physics-related joints between them are combined into a single physics body during flight, which greatly reduces the physics processing. Within these bodies there are part groups which are automatically generated. A part group is the smallest unit of parts that can "break off" of from the craft, and this means all of the parts in a group can be actually combined into a single mesh (3d object) to reduce the amount of draw calls sent to the GPU. This all happens automatically as the aircraft is loaded into the game.
Yessss
Besiege does this automatically and it helped a ton.
Not sure what kind of spaghetti code it would need though.
This may reduce part count, but it is unlikely that it would affect the performance cost.
Very interesting.
Great idea
@Kangy good idea
thisss
it should be reversable too though
@Bellcat good point, but it should have a lower performance cost
Nice idea, but the subassembly will have a high polygon count instead of the high part count.
@IceCraftGaming Probably will never see the light of day though... I gave up modding a while ago, my strengths are in the coding side of SP, and soon, wings.
@PlaneFlightX cool!
Agreed
@IceCraftGaming In fact, I have ideas for making a plane where I 3D model lots of parts of it in an external application (fuselage base and wing root, then wing segments, then doors and large moving things), then make a mod which adds all those parts, and assemble it in SP for a part count of around 100 ish parts. Good for potato PC users.
@PlaneFlightX yup, that's pretty much the whole idea, which is why rotators and engines shouldn't be included in said assembly