Most people don't like reading a wall of text, but uh, I'll try and explain.
1.11 has been out for over a year now, and I want to share my opinion on the main addition of the update that I'm probably largely responsible for being added: the ability to cut fuselages.
Before 1.11, building an aircraft with an interior was much harder. Getting realisticly thin walls and getting smooth curves on your plane without protrusions of blocks into your interior was extremely difficult. High detailed cockpits were mostly reserved for some of the most skilled builders on the site.
However, when this was done, because of the fundamentals on how paneling was done, more care was taken to get the shape of the aircraft realistic, especially considering you had to find cross-sections of the fuselage of your plane to get the shape right. Also the end result would be more room for small details and larger aircraft ended up having a higher polygon, smoother look, with shapes that blended much easier.
Now comes fuselage cutting. Now fuselage cutting is great don't get me wrong, I mean, it's great that the 20 hours we used to spend paneling a build has been reduced go about 2 hours of fuselage cutting... if you don't go into detail, but there's problems.
First thing, people have become lazy in the way they create their planes now. Especially with GA aircraft and airliners, people have been building their planes with only 1 layer of fuselage blocks vertically, and the cross-sections of aeroplanes seems to jave been completely forgotten about since 1.11. The number of cheek bones I've seen on aeroplanes and complete laziness around making the windscreens and cockpits of planes is kinda sad. It just makes plane look weird and I can't unsee them.
The next issue is that fuselage blocks only have 24 sides. This is a not-very-round shape, and is especially not-round when you get to airliner-sized aircraft. It's kinda sad seeing your windows cut in half by a clear polygon edge that you can't change the location of. It's also very annoying trying to make wings using fuselage cutting, because in the end you have a rear half of your wing that has only like 3 stupendous polygons and it's really obvious and looks terrible. It has potential, but in the end it just looks bad because of fuselage blocks.
Another thing that's kinda dumb but not related to fuselage cutting, but the number of polygons fuselages have, it's pretty lame and inefficient that fuselage blocks that are 5 metres in diameter have the exact same number of polygons as needle-sized fuselage blocks...
And the last annoying thing, that actually stops me from playing, is making smooth doors and windows, especially weird shaped ones, although they are now possible, they MAKE ME WANT TO DIE.
I am a perfectionist, and if something can be done in SP, I will probably try and do it. But doing a double-opening door on a part that has a different height on the front and rear, and tapers, and has a sideways door in the middle, and also has a circular top seriously draws the line.
ALL OF THESE PARTS HAS TO BE INDIVIDUALLY SIZED MANUALLY.
I have to calculate the correct run and size of the part for every single section and I have to do the sections for all of the curves. This jas taken me about 6 hours already, and I haven't even started the inside door yet. And most annoyingly, there is no fuselage divider in SP. It would be easier if I could just make 1 section of fuselage and slice it up to make more where the lines are on the blueprint, but if I could do that it would massively increase the part count etc.
Also making perfectly straight lines on wavy, weird shaped fuselages is also really annoying, as the fuselage fill is a slider with 1% increments, with no typable spots.
Doing the hinge line for the rudder on my C-46 took literally about 10 hours, because I had no easy mathematical way of telling how much I needed to cut the fuselage to make the line, and the tolerance of the regular cutting was massively too high. To make it straight, I had to place that really thin wing where I wanted to slice and through several minutes of trial and error, I will eventually get it in the spot that I needed.
In summary:
Hollow fuselages have made building cockpits much easier... but they make adding accuracy significantly more time consuming than just taking short cuts. The lack of polygons of the circular and curved faces of fuselages also reduce the effectiveness of fuselage cutting, and, while cutting has enabled extreme detail, it hasn't made it any easier and it's painfully time consuming and actually makes me miss the days of paneling.
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A second note. And a really important note at that. Especially for the devs.
Recently, the closed beta for the game Flyout has been released.
The discord server for the game is almost entirely made up of all the old-timer SP and SR2 players that you haven't seen in a few years. .
I've been asked to remove the advertisement explaining the game here, since, well, this is another game's forum and this game is still in closed testing; but I just want to stress to the devs, if they want to compete with this game, SP is kinda gonna need to be pretty much entirely remade. Particularly with the way fuselage blocks work. SP2 seriously needs to be put in development if it isn't already in it...
Anyway that's all.
i dont think ive commented on this website for at least a year or more and havent been active on sp, dont take what im gonna say seriously, james ur a try hard bro get a gf, also this games great and if u cant make a door bummer, also wnp i like the fueslage cutting and i also like whatever the hek was goin on w the fueslage shape in that other game that was hot too but games are great
edit: youve made some great planes too
I felt inclined to write a long response to this, but I don’t think it’d flow so I’ll try to summarise it in as few bullet points as I can. It’ll probably be really long anyway, because I have a lot of thoughts and I type too fast for my own good. First, on your comments about fuselage cutting:
And secondly, about your comments on Flyout (which seem to have changed since I wrote most of this):
One major benefit I have found is making windows or cuts into round, hollow surfaces. XML is necessary of course, but now it’s far, far easier.
Without that, it would have been far more difficult to make the flutes of a revolver’s cylinder, let alone adding a functioning ejector star.
Flyout has quite a ways to go but Stone is working fast. in my opinion it just needs retractable wing gear in order to be worth transitioning too.
Yeah I agree
j emes you got roseted by wnp7
As WPN said, they are two separate games, sure, both flyout and sp centre around building planes, and sp finally getting a competition is a real plus for us players, but having paid and played flyout, I think I’m staying here, at least for now.
Having HDRP for unity is nice and all, and building realistic-looking planes are relatively easier in fo, but when I did decide to give it a try, I've always found myself reminiscing the charm of pushing this ancient game that stated on mobile to its absolute limit.
For example, the freedom sp gives you with modding and xml editing; trying to make a blob look good with reshade + a hundred shaders, and questioning your existence as all your connection point breaks, not to mention the cursed undo button...
imo, all of the struggles above are what makes sp the amazing clusterfuck I love, and things like this, this, and this all the more impressive.
edit: (maybe I'm just a masochist... who knows)
in short i think SP needs to be specialized
For now SP can do a lot of things, but just kinda
3D modeling is kinda there, air/fluid simulation isn't there, physics simulation (ie interaction between object, joints, collision) are kinda there and gameplay is kinda there
But it's all kinda. It's good for somebody to get in, but not good enough to really make something great.
I think a good start will be built in scenario editor and or proper multiplayer
It could massive improve the playability of the game
In my opinion the next step for SP build system is block occlude/merge
This could make buildings a lot straight forward and hopefully reduce a lot of unnecessar polygons to improve performance
The key thing is that SP doesn't have Multiplayer yet we have a mod for it and I think it's time that SP for competitive reasons with Flyout had multiplayer not just because of of mobile and SP should update their tutorials and teach how to build helicopters and make new engine parts for ships and a new rudder for ships as well
Flyout people have been saying the same thing since like 3 years ago.
There is still no direct alternative to SP.
The aesthetics and mechanics of SP are still very much its own.
̶2̶4 28 Sides of fuselage... Building with calculator and notepad... But it works correctly, right?
What doesn't works correctly is slicing of hollow fuselages and a lot of underlines in combination with full stops.
I'm not sure if it's just for me and how exactly it works, so i can't send bug report at the moment, but it's a post for complaining, right?
@BaconAircraft Oh...
/s @Walvis
Name: Walv!s
Age: 69
Height: 29.9m
Hobbies: Cry, sometimes make video
Looking for: a mobile game for building planes / vehicles, must be atleast CAD level of 3D modeling, must include fully fletched coding language, full soft-body physics simulation would be a plus. Preferably only playable with a bachelors in aerospace engineering.
I can sort of understand what you're saying, but you also have to take into account that SP is a mobile game from 2014, that's been retrofitted to suit our needs.
But who am i to say, i just take screenshots of garbage i made six months ago.
I agree
As for the cross sections, I find them very difficult to do, especially on Razorback planes.
what made me
Huh, so SP has competitors? This is amazing, we may have more frequent updates! But I didn't like the part that SP can die...
Andrew needs to know this. Flyout seems to be, as it is now, insanely awesome. At the level of when I discovered SP. The cross-section editor is inexplicably amazing... If SP had something 1% similar to that, it would be infinite better.
Also, I think the skill issue isn't exactly an issue. There's still no replacement for Panneling for many things, and this cross-section editor would basically be passing from SimplePlanes to ComplexPlanes. It's not about skill anymore. SP wouldn't be so simple if it had a Blender to build the vehicles.
everybody just completely forgot how to make a good fuselage->canopy blend after fuselage cutting was added
(cheekbone syndrome)
@Rodrigo110 For me it's more than a aircraft game, you can just build whatever you want, car, boat, plane, spaceship, tank, ballon, pigeon or dragons, that's what I call the ultimate sandbox. of course, skill is needed, otherways, where would be the fun.
That being said, a cross-section editor as a mod (or in game feature) would be incredibly neat and useful (but as previously stated, might take away from the building experience in certain ways).
After taking a look at the building process and UI of FlyOut, I must say that I am impressed. But, as previous users have commented about, it definitely takes away from the effort and skill required to actually make an aircraft. Additionally, FlyOut seems to be limited to aircraft, instead of incorporating parts and processes that would allow users to create a much larger variety of builds commonly seen on SP (this is just speculation, however, and this could be incorrect). SP requires skill, time, and practice to make good aircraft, and I personally feel that this newer game (though very interesting and promising) doesn't quite live up to those same standards (this is, again, speculation). This isn't to say that this new game doesn't require any skill however, but SP (in my opinion) tends to be more rewarding due to the more complicated and time-consuming process of building a good quality aircraft. FlyOut still has a ways to go before becoming superior to SP (in my opinion).
@CanadianAircraftBuilder less than 60 but def not 200
@CanadianAircraftBuilder its actually like 35 or so
🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓 @jamesPLANESii
I agree that fuselage slicing has been immensely helpful, but at the same time, I've had to make compromises in my plane designs where fuselage slice doesn't quite line up with what I want. On a different note, Flyout looks amazing, and I really want to play it.
@ReturnOfJeffChandler yup