I was thinking about a way to make aircraft that would usually be multi-thousand part have a lower part count so that it could work better on mobile devices and i had an idea.
What if it was possible to make multiple attached parts become locked and essentially be registered as a single part? After doing this to a part, it could no longer be separated and parts within it could not move or have functions. This would be excellent for decorative usage like making a radial engine which normally takes at least 50 parts but can easily go up into the hundreds. Would this be possible and would it have the desired effect or maintaining higher FPS and being usable on mobile devices?
What do you guys think?
@jamesPLANESii
I think there's still things that act on specific part, not body, like collisions and bullets.
For entire body you can't remove internal faces, because body can be changed, e.g. one part can reveal other one when destroyed. But if some object is single part, you can make sure that it's meshes will never be changed, so you can remove all internal faces by the time you load part specifications.
@jamesPLANESii Well if you separate every single part in my mod parts (let's remove the custom 3D modelled parts entirely for now), you have over 24000 normal fuselages and other parts. I can comfortably drag out about 20 of the seat parts, (1 part for all seats in the plane), so I have 16000 * 20 = 320000 parts at 30 fps on a 3060.
That's 16 yamatos.
Also my 3060 is maxed out, usually it's idling and my i9 is doing all the work.
@jamesPLANESii ahhh that kinda makes sense. One thing that I have noticed though is that when I use four T2000 engines instead of my custom 250+ part custom engines on my plane, it does make the frame rate way better
@PlaneFlightX @Mustang51 I think one of the main contributors to your frame rate dropping is the number of polygons the craft has. Even if you murged all that into "1 part" it's still gonna have a significantly lower frame rate because it's a more detailed model.
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Edit: I just remembered that another thing SP renders is the location and rotation of every individual part, so yeah, if you murged them into 1 part I think it might improve performance a bit... maybe not as much as you guys expect though.
@SILVERPANZER ohhh right. But what does that have to do with the performance cost of high part counts?
@Mustang51 True, like at one point we're gonna need a better way to optimize our crafts
@SILVERPANZER sorry what do you mean by FT? Also why do builds that are based on the same basic craft have different FPS performance after adding hundreds of cosmetic detailing parts in that case?
@IceCraftGaming really? I feel like they don’t considering that each individual part can still come apart if the plane gets damaged or crashes. Also since my device gets a lot more laggy when I go from an aircraft with hundreds of parts to above a thousand, even if it’s just cosmetics that have been added
I suggested this once
They said that they technically already do that
Simpleplanes is slowly gonna turn into a CAD software as it adds more modeling abilities to the design editor...
@jamesPLANESii yeah that I understand but I meant it more for the purpose of reducing total part count so that a detailed engine made up of hundreds of parts will only be recognised as one, thus lowering total part count and increasing fps and overall performance on the device used to run the game. The other useful part of this is that, especially when mirroring a complex part only used for detailing, no strange part connections are accidentally established which I’ve noticed sometimes occurs when mirroring complex wings. Does that explain it better?
@jamesPLANESii True, but then I get massive improvements after I convert 5000 parts to 1 part (and it uses my GPU a lot more)
@jamesPLANESii that is the cool
SP actually kinda does this already. It beaks the plane up into sections between rotators, detaches, wings, and all parts that rotate or have wiggly connections. Each section is basically grouped together into one piece of physics, which is why when you make a palne but don't have any moving parts or wings on it, it doesn't rotate or anything when you start on a final approach location.
@ZeroWithSlashedO I hope they do something like this whenever they decide to update next. Would be an awesome addition
@Mustang51 absolutely agreed
very cool suggestion, apdut
@Kangy would love to hear what a dev thinks about this. I think it would be a great edition that seems relatively possible to do
i feel like this would be easy to do. just get the centre of mass / lift for each of the parts and combine it all into a single calculation - of course this wouldn't work for things like cockpit but this would absolutely open the realm of camouflage
but it could be hard as well given sp is pretty old
@HuskyDynamics01 I use a mac and iOS devices for SimplePlanes so sadly mods isn’t something I can do. I can download mods on the Mac but it can hardly run SP which is strange because my iPhone 11 and iPad can run it perfectly fine even with upwards of 1500 part builds
Basically you're describing modded parts. Build a subassembly in-game, export it as a 3d model, and then create a mod part that uses that model. @PlaneFlightX has been doing that for one of their builds, which you can read about here.
@phrongus would be so useful. Also parts wouldn’t accidentally randomly connect with other parts next to it
ive thought of this too
@Mustang51 me too
@Magnavox20MS233S I’ve been dreaming of this. Would love to see it