@LeoBrasi I just tried it to see if my computer could even handle streaming, and the answer is no. Even with reduced settings, SP + the broadcast software + twitch is too much for my poor old desktop. :(
The biggest problem we face with walkers in SP is that our inputs are either temporary (returning to neutral when the key/joystick is released) or unidirectional like the force from a thruster. This means that a leg cannot be extended and 'locked' into position without the use of activation groups, making the act of walking a very difficult and complicated process.
A mechanical walking mechanism with a single rotational input is entirely possible. A Dutch artist named Theo jansen created the Jansen Linkage which he uses in his moving sculptures called "Strandbeests," With this mechanism, a theoretically unlimited number of legs can be actuated by a single driveshaft.
I've got a partially functional Jansen leg built as just a proof of concept, but getting the geometry correct is really hard in the editor and will definitely require more work and some XML editing before I can implement it in a functioning vehicle.
@Skua Haha no worries dude, it'll probably be a little easier to land yours if you pull my rotators out of there, I think the weight in the nose is this thing's major flaw. I bet that adding some dead weight to the rear fuselage bits would help.
@Skua My revision had prop vectoring too, but bound to pitch and roll and capped at 3° of movement in both directions. I didn't want to make it too obvious :)
@Skua I can't test it at work - what did you change?
Also I've had some luck getting it somewhat properly oriented for landing by reversing the pitch to slow down quickly and then descending nose-first and flipping over at a few hundred feet off the ground, but it always becomes unstable as soon as I get it back to vertical. If nobody's done it by tonight I might try moving the CoM further 'back' (down?) so that it's not as top-heavy in its vertical orientation.
Uh, I'm pretty sure there's no violence in SP. There aren't even people. If it bothers you that much, you can just pretend that you're building and flying RC planes and destroying miniature bridges or something.
Don't you dare try to take away my guns and explosions.
@FullFruntall Thanks! Yeah, I've noticed that the transition can be a little tricky if you don't get some forward momentum.
Under about 80mph the combination of the elevators and RCN thrust just isn't enough to keep the nose up and since the CoT is slightly higher than the CoM, the plane flips end-over-end because it has almost no airspeed. If you have enough altitude, try cutting the throttle during the transition and allowing the plane to freefall for just a second until it gets some air moving over the wings. If you're at low altitude, you can pitch the nose up sharply to about 75 or 80 degrees just before swinging the wings back and the combination of forces will get you into FF mode and pointing basically straight up.
The transition is also slightly harder on mobile because you have to be pulling the stick full back while sliding the wings together.
Uhhh...Who told you that? Because they're lying. Pornography isn't illegal in the US. There's a multi-billion dollar Adult Entertainment industry. @Lucasmah
@Lucasmah I mean you can quote the rules all you want, but the fact is that it's not in any way "sexually suggestive" to say "pornhub," nor is "pornhub" a bad word. This post does not break the rules any more than your comment which contains the word "pornhub" does.
Denying the existence of pornography or attempting to attach a negative connotation to it is very harmful censorship. I don't expect the SimplePlanes forums to be a bastion of sex-positivity, but we can at least try to combat harmful views like pornography being "dirty" or something which cannot be discussed openly in order to "protect the children."
One of the most highly upvoted submissions to this website was some dumb anti-smoking thing. Cigarettes, like pornography, cannot be sold to anyone under 18. Does that post violate the rules because it shows something which is for adults only? Preposterous.
As an alternative idea, since the forums appear to be loosely based around reddit, it may be possible to add "trophies" for account age in the same way that reddit does. There could additionally be trophies for getting featured, getting large numbers of downloads, making highly-upvoted forum posts, etc.
@Lucasmah Woah there, it's not like he linked to it. It is not inappropriate to simply acknowledge the existence of pornography. That's a very sex-negative perspective.
The preview-on-mouseover function would be pretty cool, but I think I'd rather have an integrated 3D model viewer. I'd love to be able to see planes in 3D before downloading them.
Putting build quality restrictions on uploads would be a really bad idea. Even as a user who quite vocally advocates for higher quality builds, I think that telling anybody "your stuff isn't good enough to be on the site" is unacceptable and will turn a lot of people away from this community.
Quality is fairly subjective. Who would even decide what's good enough? How would it be determined? This is a sandbox game after all, the point is to have the freedom to build and share whatever you want. Just because a plane is ugly or doesn't fly well or isn't a plane at all doesn't mean that the creator shouldn't be free to post it on the site. Yes, the New page may be full of low-effort unflyable, unpainted, ugly made-for-a-youpotato garbage, but it shouldn't be removed or banned unless it breaks the rules.
The solution, just like it is on Reddit, is to encourage quality with your upvotes. Don't upvote things just because they come from a well-known builder, upvote things which are of high quality, detail, or performance. Just because somebody has upvoted a plane of yours does not obligate you to upvote their planes. Do not trade upvotes, do not reward people with upvotes, do not beg for upvotes. I strongly encourage all users to actually download and fly planes before you upvote them.
If we keep upvoting pointless, unflyable, non-vehicle garbage (flags, logos, flowers, art, characters, etc) to the top of the Hot page, that's what people are going to keep making.
@Rohan Just curious - did you test on mobile or desktop?
I design and build and test exclusively on PC, so the maneuverability and VTOL stability are based on keyboard controls. I just use my phone to make sure that my planes can run on the Mobile version but I don't really do any testing because mobile controls suck.
because it's illegal but the I.p. adress could give away where they live
@AeroEngineering Fortuantely, it's not nearly as simple as that. Not only does an IP not give you an exact location, nobody in the United States has ever gone to jail for pirating movies, music, or games. The industry rarely even fines people anymore.
There's also very little that can be done with just an IP address. It's not like you can say "hey my neighbor is pirating movies" and your local police will come arrest them. Which, overall, is a very good thing.
@jsaret I don't think anything that extreme needs to be implemented, but I'm not sure what else to do about it other than reporting the repaints and ignoring the made-for-youpotato trash.
Hopefully all of these new users will eventually contribute to the community with original builds rather than begging for the attention of celebrities with unflyable garbage or terrible repaints of other peoples' work.
@MrVaultech It's hilarious when you forget that you have it installed and then start reading news articles about Apple expanding butt storage capacity.
@ProKillaV12 Hah, yeah, forgot to change that one. I've got a Chrome extension that automatically changes "youtuber" to "youpotato" now (like the cloud to butt extention) so I missed it.
Unfortunately it seems that the legions of little youpotato fanboys are myriad and endless. Most of the accounts uploading the offending builds are brand new users and have 0 points.
I don't get it. What's the goal for them? That their "youtube famous" (ugh) idol will say their name in a video or something? How petty.
I will add a word of caution with XML editing: It is very easy to make an engine that's 10,000 times as strong as a normal one or a fuel tank with a billion gallon capacity and 0 weight, but in my opinion there's a point where too much XML editing 'spoils' the fun of the game.
Pretty much any POS plane will go super fast and turn like it's on rails if you put an extremely overpowered engine on it. The Ground Speed Challenge can be completed with a single small engine pumped up to just a few times the base power. SAM evasion is really easy too, if you're doing a million miles an hour. And yes, you can throw a hundred thousand gallons of fuel into a single fuel tank block and not have to worry about your weight distribution or fuel capacity, but in my opinion there's something about it that feels a little like cheating. It eliminates part of the challenge of building a good, balanced plane with the parts you're given and working with the game physics instead of trying to defeat the built-in restrictions like fuel capacity, drag and engine power.
That being said some of the best and most popular planes on the site (SR's stuff, for example) are heavily modified with suped-up engines and fuel tanks, but they're also some of the most detailed and exquisitely built aircraft which wouldn't work properly or perform as well if they had to be built with unmodified parts.
Airplanes are saved locally as XML files. On PC, these XML files are located in
C:\Users\Username\AppData\LocalLow\Jundroo\AircraftDesigns
Those XML files can be opened with a text editor, and the properties of each piece can be changed. Parts can be moved, rotated, scaled, and edited in increments smaller/larger than the game's editor will allow.
XML editing allows for greater levels of detail, as well as performance tweaks like overpowered engines, removal of drag forces, and adjusting the Angle of Attack of wings/stabilisers.
If this same logic is applied to this game, there has to be some kind of map edge.
Don't apply Minecraft logic to SimplePlanes, they're different in almost every way possible. Minecraft was written in Java. SP runs on the Unity engine. There's not necessarily any reason that the world needs to have an edge.
@spefyjerbf I believe custom tags would actually be a good solution to the issue, but I fear it may encourage people to create more repainted versions of other peoples' aircraft.
If people want a youpotato to test a build, they should just tag them in the comments of that build. Repainting other peoples' planes for a youpotato to fly takes credit, points, and recognition away from the original builder. I take pride in all my builds, including the paint. If someone is going to fly my plane in a video, I want it to be shown how I intended, not repainted some ugly brown or green/black thing.
Or how about everybody stops desperately trying to attract the youpotatos and just let them pick what they want to fly instead of repainting other peoples' hard work and begging for their attention.
ABSOLUTELY NOT.
Very realistic! This is seriously one of my favorite builds ever.
The best car.........in the world.
AMPHIBIOUS VERSION
ARMED VERSION
@LeoBrasi I just tried it to see if my computer could even handle streaming, and the answer is no. Even with reduced settings, SP + the broadcast software + twitch is too much for my poor old desktop. :(
I would stream, but I feel like my building process might be a little boring to watch. Also I'm running dry in the ideas department.
Nope. When you don't believe in any sort of afterlife, believing in ghosts becomes illogical.
My Scissor Wing is a pretty unique VTOL aircraft and should be AI-compatible.
The biggest problem we face with walkers in SP is that our inputs are either temporary (returning to neutral when the key/joystick is released) or unidirectional like the force from a thruster. This means that a leg cannot be extended and 'locked' into position without the use of activation groups, making the act of walking a very difficult and complicated process.
A mechanical walking mechanism with a single rotational input is entirely possible. A Dutch artist named Theo jansen created the Jansen Linkage which he uses in his moving sculptures called "Strandbeests," With this mechanism, a theoretically unlimited number of legs can be actuated by a single driveshaft.
I've got a partially functional Jansen leg built as just a proof of concept, but getting the geometry correct is really hard in the editor and will definitely require more work and some XML editing before I can implement it in a functioning vehicle.
@Skua Haha no worries dude, it'll probably be a little easier to land yours if you pull my rotators out of there, I think the weight in the nose is this thing's major flaw. I bet that adding some dead weight to the rear fuselage bits would help.
@Skua My revision had prop vectoring too, but bound to pitch and roll and capped at 3° of movement in both directions. I didn't want to make it too obvious :)
@Skua I can't test it at work - what did you change?
Also I've had some luck getting it somewhat properly oriented for landing by reversing the pitch to slow down quickly and then descending nose-first and flipping over at a few hundred feet off the ground, but it always becomes unstable as soon as I get it back to vertical. If nobody's done it by tonight I might try moving the CoM further 'back' (down?) so that it's not as top-heavy in its vertical orientation.
I like this thing. I like it so much that I made it a bit easier to control in hover with some XML magic. Press 1 to toggle the prop vectoring on or off.
Still can't land it, though!
@JMicah4
How to factory reset your Nexus Device - Google Support
Check out the "Nexus 7" drop-down section, that should give you all the proper procedures.
NOT THIS TIME, BUDDY.
Uh, I'm pretty sure there's no violence in SP. There aren't even people. If it bothers you that much, you can just pretend that you're building and flying RC planes and destroying miniature bridges or something.
Don't you dare try to take away my guns and explosions.
@FullFruntall Thanks! Yeah, I've noticed that the transition can be a little tricky if you don't get some forward momentum.
Under about 80mph the combination of the elevators and RCN thrust just isn't enough to keep the nose up and since the CoT is slightly higher than the CoM, the plane flips end-over-end because it has almost no airspeed. If you have enough altitude, try cutting the throttle during the transition and allowing the plane to freefall for just a second until it gets some air moving over the wings. If you're at low altitude, you can pitch the nose up sharply to about 75 or 80 degrees just before swinging the wings back and the combination of forces will get you into FF mode and pointing basically straight up.
The transition is also slightly harder on mobile because you have to be pulling the stick full back while sliding the wings together.
@Rangerofdarkness2
A mobile version is available here!
Uhhh...Who told you that? Because they're lying. Pornography isn't illegal in the US. There's a multi-billion dollar Adult Entertainment industry. @Lucasmah
@Lucasmah I mean you can quote the rules all you want, but the fact is that it's not in any way "sexually suggestive" to say "pornhub," nor is "pornhub" a bad word. This post does not break the rules any more than your comment which contains the word "pornhub" does.
Denying the existence of pornography or attempting to attach a negative connotation to it is very harmful censorship. I don't expect the SimplePlanes forums to be a bastion of sex-positivity, but we can at least try to combat harmful views like pornography being "dirty" or something which cannot be discussed openly in order to "protect the children."
One of the most highly upvoted submissions to this website was some dumb anti-smoking thing. Cigarettes, like pornography, cannot be sold to anyone under 18. Does that post violate the rules because it shows something which is for adults only? Preposterous.
As an alternative idea, since the forums appear to be loosely based around reddit, it may be possible to add "trophies" for account age in the same way that reddit does. There could additionally be trophies for getting featured, getting large numbers of downloads, making highly-upvoted forum posts, etc.
@Lucasmah Woah there, it's not like he linked to it. It is not inappropriate to simply acknowledge the existence of pornography. That's a very sex-negative perspective.
The preview-on-mouseover function would be pretty cool, but I think I'd rather have an integrated 3D model viewer. I'd love to be able to see planes in 3D before downloading them.
Putting build quality restrictions on uploads would be a really bad idea. Even as a user who quite vocally advocates for higher quality builds, I think that telling anybody "your stuff isn't good enough to be on the site" is unacceptable and will turn a lot of people away from this community.
Quality is fairly subjective. Who would even decide what's good enough? How would it be determined? This is a sandbox game after all, the point is to have the freedom to build and share whatever you want. Just because a plane is ugly or doesn't fly well or isn't a plane at all doesn't mean that the creator shouldn't be free to post it on the site. Yes, the New page may be full of low-effort unflyable, unpainted, ugly made-for-a-youpotato garbage, but it shouldn't be removed or banned unless it breaks the rules.
The solution, just like it is on Reddit, is to encourage quality with your upvotes. Don't upvote things just because they come from a well-known builder, upvote things which are of high quality, detail, or performance. Just because somebody has upvoted a plane of yours does not obligate you to upvote their planes. Do not trade upvotes, do not reward people with upvotes, do not beg for upvotes. I strongly encourage all users to actually download and fly planes before you upvote them.
If we keep upvoting pointless, unflyable, non-vehicle garbage (flags, logos, flowers, art, characters, etc) to the top of the Hot page, that's what people are going to keep making.
@Rohan Just curious - did you test on mobile or desktop?
I design and build and test exclusively on PC, so the maneuverability and VTOL stability are based on keyboard controls. I just use my phone to make sure that my planes can run on the Mobile version but I don't really do any testing because mobile controls suck.
No offense to anyone, but I'm not sure that the speed at which points are acquired has any kind of correlation to the quality of a user's work.
@AeroEngineering Fortuantely, it's not nearly as simple as that. Not only does an IP not give you an exact location, nobody in the United States has ever gone to jail for pirating movies, music, or games. The industry rarely even fines people anymore.
There's also very little that can be done with just an IP address. It's not like you can say "hey my neighbor is pirating movies" and your local police will come arrest them. Which, overall, is a very good thing.
Good looking out, dude! Just tagging the devs @philiptarpley @andrewgarrison @nathanmikeska @kevinmurphy so they'll see it.
Try loading planes by copying the URL and pressing Ctrl+L in the editor?
@DeezDucks @Rohan @Chemicalau @letsgofast11 Thanks dudes!
Mobile Version Link
Does the crossbar count?
Plane's not released quite yet, though. Still in the testing phase.
EDIT: Testing complete. Here it is!
How mature of you.
Yay!
@Eldael Glad you're enjoying it!
@Shipmaster Thanks, dude!
REPORTED FOR HATE SPEECH @Skua
@jsaret I don't think anything that extreme needs to be implemented, but I'm not sure what else to do about it other than reporting the repaints and ignoring the made-for-youpotato trash.
Hopefully all of these new users will eventually contribute to the community with original builds rather than begging for the attention of celebrities with unflyable garbage or terrible repaints of other peoples' work.
@MrVaultech It's hilarious when you forget that you have it installed and then start reading news articles about Apple expanding butt storage capacity.
@ProKillaV12 Hah, yeah, forgot to change that one. I've got a Chrome extension that automatically changes "youtuber" to "youpotato" now (like the cloud to butt extention) so I missed it.
Unfortunately it seems that the legions of little youpotato fanboys are myriad and endless. Most of the accounts uploading the offending builds are brand new users and have 0 points.
I don't get it. What's the goal for them? That their "youtube famous" (ugh) idol will say their name in a video or something? How petty.
I will add a word of caution with XML editing: It is very easy to make an engine that's 10,000 times as strong as a normal one or a fuel tank with a billion gallon capacity and 0 weight, but in my opinion there's a point where too much XML editing 'spoils' the fun of the game.
Pretty much any POS plane will go super fast and turn like it's on rails if you put an extremely overpowered engine on it. The Ground Speed Challenge can be completed with a single small engine pumped up to just a few times the base power. SAM evasion is really easy too, if you're doing a million miles an hour. And yes, you can throw a hundred thousand gallons of fuel into a single fuel tank block and not have to worry about your weight distribution or fuel capacity, but in my opinion there's something about it that feels a little like cheating. It eliminates part of the challenge of building a good, balanced plane with the parts you're given and working with the game physics instead of trying to defeat the built-in restrictions like fuel capacity, drag and engine power.
That being said some of the best and most popular planes on the site (SR's stuff, for example) are heavily modified with suped-up engines and fuel tanks, but they're also some of the most detailed and exquisitely built aircraft which wouldn't work properly or perform as well if they had to be built with unmodified parts.
Airplanes are saved locally as XML files. On PC, these XML files are located in
C:\Users\Username\AppData\LocalLow\Jundroo\AircraftDesigns
Those XML files can be opened with a text editor, and the properties of each piece can be changed. Parts can be moved, rotated, scaled, and edited in increments smaller/larger than the game's editor will allow.
XML editing allows for greater levels of detail, as well as performance tweaks like overpowered engines, removal of drag forces, and adjusting the Angle of Attack of wings/stabilisers.
Don't apply Minecraft logic to SimplePlanes, they're different in almost every way possible. Minecraft was written in Java. SP runs on the Unity engine. There's not necessarily any reason that the world needs to have an edge.
@spefyjerbf I believe custom tags would actually be a good solution to the issue, but I fear it may encourage people to create more repainted versions of other peoples' aircraft.
If people want a youpotato to test a build, they should just tag them in the comments of that build. Repainting other peoples' planes for a youpotato to fly takes credit, points, and recognition away from the original builder. I take pride in all my builds, including the paint. If someone is going to fly my plane in a video, I want it to be shown how I intended, not repainted some ugly brown or green/black thing.
Mobile Version
Or how about everybody stops desperately trying to attract the youpotatos and just let them pick what they want to fly instead of repainting other peoples' hard work and begging for their attention.
Short answer: Improbable due to mobile processor constraints.
@Rohan Yeah, unfortunately Markup and tagging doesn't work in the plane description. Sorry bout that, but thanks again dude!