Ooh, that'd be neat! I think the VR version of the game only runs on the low physics setting though (might be wrong, you'd have to check) so you'd need to make sure it works properly on that as well. Mechanical systems are always cool though, and I'd imagine they'd be especially so in VR!
Not a bad idea on the surface (pun intended), but the problem is that it would require a full, decent-resolution UV map to be done for every single part in the game, instead of the current basic materials system that the game uses.
Currently, a part (say, a prop engine) is essentially split into three or four sub-models, each of which can be colored independently. To the average player, these are known as the part's Primary, Trim 1, Trim 2, and (sometimes) Trim 3 colors. When painting a part, currently all the game has to do is specify which color slot gets applied to that section of the part.
For example, if you have a part painted with the first three colors as Primary, Trim 1, and Trim 2, all the game has to know, code-wise, for how to color that part is material=1,2,3 (along with the associated color codes that occupy those slots, which are defined elsewhere in the plane file).
Switching to a fully texture-able system would require the game to be able to store (and generate) not only the basic color data, but also much more complex data like size, position, and orientation, as well as the actual graphic being applied. That goes for every single part in the game, and for every piece of imagery or color applied to them.
Tl;dr not a bad idea on the surface, but technically infeasible given the way the game works (and likely for performance reasons as well).
The numbers are for the blueprint scale, which you can adjust to make the image be whatever size you want to build from. I typically will start by just laying out a bunch of fuselage blocks to get the overall length (as determined via the craft properties tab of the Menu window in the editor), and then scale the blueprint to fit that.
The position is just if you need to move it horizontally/vertically from the default for whatever reason. Blueprint position is locked to the active cockpit block, so if you move that to a different spot on the build you might need to readjust your blueprint so it isn't shifted out of position.
Great idea, except Apple decided several years ago to prevent third-party mods from running on their devices (or something to that effect), so there's really no way for it to work. Additionally, mod downloads (on other devices at least) are already pretty much the same as downloading a plane.
At the time of posting this forum, your build that "didn't even get seen by people" had been up for approximately three hours. That's both within your "5 hours" window and an utterly insignificant amount of time for a build to be on the site, sorry.
Plus, keep in mind that the time you post stuff matters, particularly for your "5 hours" window. People might be sleeping or working or whatever.
Hmm. Maybe try LMMS? It's not super user-friendly for beginners, but you can sort of do a "put in the instruments you want and then tell them what to do" kind of thing. Plus it's free, which is a better price than a lot of other music programs out there.
@FlirBlitz Yeah, dunno what might be going on. Without a specific date for the image it's hard to say. The USS George H. W. Bush was last reported 5 days ago off Italy, but there's no telling where it might have been before that (at least, not from publicly available data).
The Bush is really the only carrier that it could be though, since there's literally no other operational (cough cough Kuznetzov cough cough) carriers in that part of the world (other than the Turkish TCG Anadolu, which doesn't have the same deck profile).
It seems we have more questions than answers here. Maybe there'll be something in the news in a few weeks, but I doubt it.
Definitely looks like a carrier with the way the upper deck is shaped. Interestingly, though it's visible in both Google Maps and Google Earth, it is not visible on Apple Maps or other publicly available software (that I've seen, anyway). Which carrier, though, is a bit of a mystery, since none of the Black Sea navies have a carrier with that profile and the US Navy's task group is supposed to be in the Mediterranean.
The stock P-51-B has a bit of a center-of-gravity issue; it's a little too close to the center of lift. Hopefully this gets fixed since it's odd for a stock plane to have an issue like this, but if not it's a really simple thing to correct.
@Numbers2 @Blb1981 Oh, I fully agree that SimplePlanes' AI needs an update (or even a complete overhaul). It's such an outdated system that I'm surprised it works as well as it does. (For example, the AI still doesn't know how to fly helicopters even though dedicated rotor parts have been in-game for... how long now?)
Honestly it's somewhat of a miracle that the AI functions as smoothly as it does, given the huge variations between different player-built aircraft. With regards to the F-22, the AI didn't use the thrust vectoring simply because it didn't know it could. The AI is limited to the basic flight controls plus weapons, and will try to keep itself away from what it thinks is a stall whenever possible. This means that it will never intentionally perform post-stall maneuvers. Similar thing for activation groups and the VTOL and Trim sliders. The AI never uses them because it just doesn't know what they do, and therefore can't know [i]when[/i] to use them.
It is theoretically possible to build a plane that would "trick" the AI into performing some semblance of post-stall maneuvers, but it would undoubtedly be very tricky and I don't think anyone's tried it.
Tl;dr the AI was only designed to fly basic aircraft, and doesn't know how to take full advantage of more advanced designs (and therefore loses control of them somewhat often, leading to unplanned kinetic disassembly).
Regarding the "hit with its guns like a decillion times and I can still fly", that's just a discrepancy between the gun damage and the part health, both of which are set by the players who built the planes. Either the health-to-damage ratio was just off, or you just didn't get hit anywhere vital, neither of which are related to the AI.
Under Game Settings (Pause menu -> Settings -> Game Settings), set AI Air Traffic to "None". This will make the game stop automatically spawning AI planes.
I haven't found one single source that states specifically what the Northrop A-17's bomb load consisted of, but three independent sources provided the following information when combined:
* 20x 30lb fragmentation bombs in internal bay (in vertical chutes)
* 4x 100lb bombs on external racks
The sources did conflict with regards to the aircraft's total bomb load but I assume the actual bomb counts are accurate and the discrepancies originated elsewhere, though I can't say for certain.
A lot of learning how to make "good planes" comes from digging into planes that other people have made, seeing and then understanding the methods and techniques they use, and then adapting those techniques to fit your own personal building style. It isn't just a flip-of-the-switch, "follow these steps and you'll build good planes" thing.
Sure, there's general tips to be had ("use blueprints", etc.), but there can be no definitive answer on what makes a "good plane", because everyone has their own standards regarding what makes something "good".
Additionally, clickbait posts like this are really not helpful for those who are actually looking for information and tips on how to advance their building skills.
I can say with a fair amount of certainty that the physics won't be changed much, if at all, to avoid breaking the hundreds of thousands of existing builds (or whatever ludicrous number we're up to now) that were built with what would then be the "old" physics. I could maybe see updates to the map, but the existing terrain - though unrealistic - is a pretty good environment for testing all sorts of different types of builds, so I'd expect a new map to only come with a new game. New terrain textures and maybe some more trees or buildings would be kinda nice though. So would optimization.
Pretty easy to check. Spawn at the airport you want to measure from, spawn an AI on your head (while paused), then change locations to another airport and measure how far away the AI plane is.
Wright <--> Krakabloa is thirtysomething miles (depending on whether you're measuring Yeager or Bandit)
Wright <--> Snowstone is 67ish I believe
Wright <--> Maywar is somewhere between 40 and 60 depending on where on Maywar you measure from
And Wright <--> Sky Park City is like five or six I think.
I have seen the dev for another game I play use ChatGPT to generate a basic section of code that he then modified (quite a bit) to work with the specific features he wanted to implement. It saves some of the busywork part of coding, but still can't do specific things very well.
@Mrgoofy Apologies, I've been preoccupied with more important things (no offense intended) this week, so I haven't had time to respond.
If you want to tag me on an unlisted post of your tank, I can check it out, sure. Should be a super easy fix for you to do, but I can still take a look if you want.
Hard to say for certain given the lack of specifics, but the likely issue is the weight of the turret relative to the weight of the body. Either make the turret weigh less or make the body weigh more.
Not in the sense that you can adjust it "on the fly", no. You could have multiple cannons with different muzzle velocities to switch between, but you can't have one cannon with multiple muzzle velocities.
@Erc90F4RU It's fully allowed to do swastikas and other symbols like that specifically for historical accuracy (as specified in the site rules). In this case, you'd be entirely fine doing so if you want to.
Generally they're flying comparatively short distances, so there's no point in climbing higher than necessary. Plus, optimization for good STOL performance generally comes at the cost of high-altitude efficiency.
The RPM is pretty self-explanatory (the speed at which the wheel is spinning in revolutions per minute).
I believe Offroad is whether the wheel is on a paved surface (e.g. runway) or not. I'm not certain but it would make sense. (Either that or it's just if the wheel is touching the ground at all).
Not sure on Forward/Sideways Slip. I'd assume that would be some measure of how much the wheel is skidding forwards (i.e. along the direction of travel) or sideways (i.e. not along the direction of travel), but I can't say for certain.
@SaturnBuildsStuff Cool, thanks! I don't think I'll be able to make that deadline but that's all right (I've got a ton of other stuff going on right now and really don't have time to build things anyway). I'm excited to see what people come up with for this!
Are you, by chance, crashing or exploding? The cockpit is an indestructible part (barring the rare glitch where it too vanishes after a particularly nasty crash), meaning that if enough force is involved in the crash it can go quite far, and fast. However, I haven't heard of it yeeting itself into oblivion just all on its own. It generally occurs due to collision or explosion.
Ooh, that'd be neat! I think the VR version of the game only runs on the low physics setting though (might be wrong, you'd have to check) so you'd need to make sure it works properly on that as well. Mechanical systems are always cool though, and I'd imagine they'd be especially so in VR!
+1@Dogedogebread13 Well, someone made a mod for that if you want to try it out.
+1https://www.simpleplanes.com/Mods/View/1379397/Textured-Fuselage-Block
Not a bad idea on the surface (pun intended), but the problem is that it would require a full, decent-resolution UV map to be done for every single part in the game, instead of the current basic materials system that the game uses.
Currently, a part (say, a prop engine) is essentially split into three or four sub-models, each of which can be colored independently. To the average player, these are known as the part's Primary, Trim 1, Trim 2, and (sometimes) Trim 3 colors. When painting a part, currently all the game has to do is specify which color slot gets applied to that section of the part.
For example, if you have a part painted with the first three colors as Primary, Trim 1, and Trim 2, all the game has to know, code-wise, for how to color that part is
material=1,2,3(along with the associated color codes that occupy those slots, which are defined elsewhere in the plane file).Switching to a fully texture-able system would require the game to be able to store (and generate) not only the basic color data, but also much more complex data like size, position, and orientation, as well as the actual graphic being applied. That goes for every single part in the game, and for every piece of imagery or color applied to them.
Tl;dr not a bad idea on the surface, but technically infeasible given the way the game works (and likely for performance reasons as well).
+5T
Ooh this looks neat
+1@NawcandoAK47 Sorry, my mistake. I meant the "Cockpit Interior" section.
There's a text label part under the "Cockpits" section.
Happy Easter!
+2The WING
+1An UwUAV, if you will
+1The numbers are for the blueprint scale, which you can adjust to make the image be whatever size you want to build from. I typically will start by just laying out a bunch of fuselage blocks to get the overall length (as determined via the craft properties tab of the Menu window in the editor), and then scale the blueprint to fit that.
The position is just if you need to move it horizontally/vertically from the default for whatever reason. Blueprint position is locked to the active cockpit block, so if you move that to a different spot on the build you might need to readjust your blueprint so it isn't shifted out of position.
Great idea, except Apple decided several years ago to prevent third-party mods from running on their devices (or something to that effect), so there's really no way for it to work. Additionally, mod downloads (on other devices at least) are already pretty much the same as downloading a plane.
+2At the time of posting this forum, your build that "didn't even get seen by people" had been up for approximately three hours. That's both within your "5 hours" window and an utterly insignificant amount of time for a build to be on the site, sorry.
Plus, keep in mind that the time you post stuff matters, particularly for your "5 hours" window. People might be sleeping or working or whatever.
Hmm. Maybe try LMMS? It's not super user-friendly for beginners, but you can sort of do a "put in the instruments you want and then tell them what to do" kind of thing. Plus it's free, which is a better price than a lot of other music programs out there.
+1@FlirBlitz Yeah, dunno what might be going on. Without a specific date for the image it's hard to say. The USS George H. W. Bush was last reported 5 days ago off Italy, but there's no telling where it might have been before that (at least, not from publicly available data).
The Bush is really the only carrier that it could be though, since there's literally no other operational (cough cough Kuznetzov cough cough) carriers in that part of the world (other than the Turkish TCG Anadolu, which doesn't have the same deck profile).
It seems we have more questions than answers here. Maybe there'll be something in the news in a few weeks, but I doubt it.
+1Definitely looks like a carrier with the way the upper deck is shaped. Interestingly, though it's visible in both Google Maps and Google Earth, it is not visible on Apple Maps or other publicly available software (that I've seen, anyway). Which carrier, though, is a bit of a mystery, since none of the Black Sea navies have a carrier with that profile and the US Navy's task group is supposed to be in the Mediterranean.
Here's the Google Maps coords for anyone who wants to take a look themselves.
Those are some nice pictures!
Theoretically I think it should be possible through some (ab)use of the control base, but I'm not sure how.
The stock P-51-B has a bit of a center-of-gravity issue; it's a little too close to the center of lift. Hopefully this gets fixed since it's odd for a stock plane to have an issue like this, but if not it's a really simple thing to correct.
+3@Numbers2 @Blb1981 Oh, I fully agree that SimplePlanes' AI needs an update (or even a complete overhaul). It's such an outdated system that I'm surprised it works as well as it does. (For example, the AI still doesn't know how to fly helicopters even though dedicated rotor parts have been in-game for... how long now?)
+2Honestly it's somewhat of a miracle that the AI functions as smoothly as it does, given the huge variations between different player-built aircraft. With regards to the F-22, the AI didn't use the thrust vectoring simply because it didn't know it could. The AI is limited to the basic flight controls plus weapons, and will try to keep itself away from what it thinks is a stall whenever possible. This means that it will never intentionally perform post-stall maneuvers. Similar thing for activation groups and the VTOL and Trim sliders. The AI never uses them because it just doesn't know what they do, and therefore can't know [i]when[/i] to use them.
It is theoretically possible to build a plane that would "trick" the AI into performing some semblance of post-stall maneuvers, but it would undoubtedly be very tricky and I don't think anyone's tried it.
Tl;dr the AI was only designed to fly basic aircraft, and doesn't know how to take full advantage of more advanced designs (and therefore loses control of them somewhat often, leading to unplanned kinetic disassembly).
Regarding the "hit with its guns like a decillion times and I can still fly", that's just a discrepancy between the gun damage and the part health, both of which are set by the players who built the planes. Either the health-to-damage ratio was just off, or you just didn't get hit anywhere vital, neither of which are related to the AI.
+3Under Game Settings (Pause menu -> Settings -> Game Settings), set AI Air Traffic to "None". This will make the game stop automatically spawning AI planes.
[text you want to display](url)For example:
This link goes to the main page of the site
[This link goes to the main page of the site](https://www.simpleplanes.com)If you're good at keeping your aircraft stable, you can also fly under the wing of the tanker and hit a propeller with your vertical stabilizer.
+1Ok bye.
I haven't found one single source that states specifically what the Northrop A-17's bomb load consisted of, but three independent sources provided the following information when combined:
* 20x 30lb fragmentation bombs in internal bay (in vertical chutes)
* 4x 100lb bombs on external racks
Sources:
https://www.aviastar.org/air/usa/northrop_a-17.php
https://www.nationalmuseum.af.mil/Visit/Museum-Exhibits/Fact-Sheets/Display/Article/198097/northrop-a-17a/
https://www.boeing.com/history/products/a-17-8a-light-attack-bomber.page
The sources did conflict with regards to the aircraft's total bomb load but I assume the actual bomb counts are accurate and the discrepancies originated elsewhere, though I can't say for certain.
+1A lot of learning how to make "good planes" comes from digging into planes that other people have made, seeing and then understanding the methods and techniques they use, and then adapting those techniques to fit your own personal building style. It isn't just a flip-of-the-switch, "follow these steps and you'll build good planes" thing.
Sure, there's general tips to be had ("use blueprints", etc.), but there can be no definitive answer on what makes a "good plane", because everyone has their own standards regarding what makes something "good".
Additionally, clickbait posts like this are really not helpful for those who are actually looking for information and tips on how to advance their building skills.
3: Move the CoM and CoL closer together (note that this may also make the plane more unstable when pitching, so adjust with care).
+1T
Main Menu -> Settings -> On-Screen Flight Controls
YOOOOOO this looks so good!
+1(Plus now I don't have to feel as bad about not finishing the Beaver I started like a year ago haha)
I can say with a fair amount of certainty that the physics won't be changed much, if at all, to avoid breaking the hundreds of thousands of existing builds (or whatever ludicrous number we're up to now) that were built with what would then be the "old" physics. I could maybe see updates to the map, but the existing terrain - though unrealistic - is a pretty good environment for testing all sorts of different types of builds, so I'd expect a new map to only come with a new game. New terrain textures and maybe some more trees or buildings would be kinda nice though. So would optimization.
+1Pretty easy to check. Spawn at the airport you want to measure from, spawn an AI on your head (while paused), then change locations to another airport and measure how far away the AI plane is.
Wright <--> Krakabloa is thirtysomething miles (depending on whether you're measuring Yeager or Bandit)
Wright <--> Snowstone is 67ish I believe
Wright <--> Maywar is somewhere between 40 and 60 depending on where on Maywar you measure from
And Wright <--> Sky Park City is like five or six I think.
...huh.
+1I have seen the dev for another game I play use ChatGPT to generate a basic section of code that he then modified (quite a bit) to work with the specific features he wanted to implement. It saves some of the busywork part of coding, but still can't do specific things very well.
+1@Mrgoofy Apologies, I've been preoccupied with more important things (no offense intended) this week, so I haven't had time to respond.
If you want to tag me on an unlisted post of your tank, I can check it out, sure. Should be a super easy fix for you to do, but I can still take a look if you want.
Hard to say for certain given the lack of specifics, but the likely issue is the weight of the turret relative to the weight of the body. Either make the turret weigh less or make the body weigh more.
Not in the sense that you can adjust it "on the fly", no. You could have multiple cannons with different muzzle velocities to switch between, but you can't have one cannon with multiple muzzle velocities.
+1@Erc90F4RU It's fully allowed to do swastikas and other symbols like that specifically for historical accuracy (as specified in the site rules). In this case, you'd be entirely fine doing so if you want to.
+1@AWACSgodess Ironically the software you need was linked in the post you linked in your comment. Here it is.
+1Ooh, that looks great!
+1Does-
+1Does the s-
Does the-
Does the snoot-
Does the snoot d-
Generally they're flying comparatively short distances, so there's no point in climbing higher than necessary. Plus, optimization for good STOL performance generally comes at the cost of high-altitude efficiency.
+3Buoyancy can only be between 0 (0% buoyancy) and 1 (100% buoyancy), mainly because something like 200% buoyancy just doesn't make any sense.
+1The RPM is pretty self-explanatory (the speed at which the wheel is spinning in revolutions per minute).
+2I believe Offroad is whether the wheel is on a paved surface (e.g. runway) or not. I'm not certain but it would make sense. (Either that or it's just if the wheel is touching the ground at all).
Not sure on Forward/Sideways Slip. I'd assume that would be some measure of how much the wheel is skidding forwards (i.e. along the direction of travel) or sideways (i.e. not along the direction of travel), but I can't say for certain.
@Phox e
I imagine it would be pretty easy doing it that way, yes...
It's not in his comment history.
+3@SaturnBuildsStuff Cool, thanks! I don't think I'll be able to make that deadline but that's all right (I've got a ton of other stuff going on right now and really don't have time to build things anyway). I'm excited to see what people come up with for this!
+1Are you, by chance, crashing or exploding? The cockpit is an indestructible part (barring the rare glitch where it too vanishes after a particularly nasty crash), meaning that if enough force is involved in the crash it can go quite far, and fast. However, I haven't heard of it yeeting itself into oblivion just all on its own. It generally occurs due to collision or explosion.