@TitanIncorporated A lot of people request me to build stuff, and then get upset when I refuse (or when I say yes and then take a long time to get to it). But the thing is, I just build whatever comes to mind. If I try to accommodate requests, the game becomes no fun for me anymore. So: someday I might build a land vehicle, but don't hold me to a deadline.
@Mustang51 Well, gears don't work well enough in SimplePlanes to make really impressive animations/machines, but I suppose I could fake them with rotators.
@Treadmill103 Yeah I experimented with copper/bronze shades, but they didn't stand out enough against my preferred lighting and location conditions (see GIF). And I have a tremendous, tremendous affection for the pure grey metallic finish, now perhaps infinitely better known as the "Cybertruck grey."
@Treadmill103 What do you think of this one? When you mentioned you spawned the last one somewhere to enjoy the lighting, I thought it would be good to add some flight capability. Because setting drag to false on airbrakes doesn't do anything, flight handling deteriorates quite a bit at speed.
@enzoBoeing757 Well, I think it's best when you fly it to beautiful locations with the right lighting and watch it spin in the sun's rays. I want to encourage people to fly it.
@enzoBoeing757 It's an animation sequence that takes a relatively long time to run all the way through... the 'slow reveal.' I've updated the description as well.
@Brendorkus As an adult with a full-time job and many, many hobbies, I can assure you I don't have all that much time on my hands. It's not time you need to come up with something like this, it's creativity.
@Freerider2142 I wish the cannon was more customizable, though, with a damage property and more shell types. It would be great to be able to make a railgun...
At present, if you want to make a custom shape that acts as a light (for instance, formation light strips on military aircraft, a light bar for a truck, or an abstract sculpted shape that acts like a light), you only have one option: make the shape out of beacon lights. This is very limiting, because the beacon lights' fixed shape and useless base make it impossible to make a number of shapes. If the developers simply gave us the ability to set a material's ambient property to 1, so that it would always glow at full brightness, you could turn any subassembly built out of any kind of parts into a light. A halo is not required, so it should be easy to program. So you could build light strips, spirals, globes, hemispheres, abstract sculptures, whatever.
Sometimes you just want to animate stuff, without affecting physics. The current "mover" parts like pistons and rotators don't allow this. Want a dial for your cockpit? Simple, use a rotator. But if your build is heavy, the dial's rotation is going to impart angular momentum to the entire aircraft (or tank, or whatever). You can override this with diffuseInertiaTensors="false", but that can cause terrible lag on large/complex builds. Or say you want a sliding door for an ejection port on an automatic weapon. Right now, you can only do this with pistons, which add a horrible sound effect, and the movement can't be customized -- you can only control the speed. Pistons also break quite easily. And last but not least, all those moving parts require additional physics calculations, which cause unnecessary lag.
What I'd like is a generic, ideal "mover" part, that can be programmed to rotate or translate a subassembly in any way, without affecting physics. I'd like to be able to specify "from time 0 to 0.5 seconds, slide 0.5 units along the Z-axis at a constant speed V; from 0.5 to 0.6 seconds, rotate outwards around the Y-axis with an ease-in and ease-out for the speed;" and so on. This would allow players to build completely custom animated stuff like variable-nozzle "turkey feathers," muzzle brakes, gun recoil mechanisms, gun loading mechanisms, rotating radars on Star Wars builds, sliding and rotating doors, moving eyes in robot heads, and so on. They should also come with a library of sound effects to choose from, and the ability to make them completely silent as well. Few things set my teeth on edge like activating a piston or rotator in SP and hearing that awful whirring noise that can completely break immmersion, as when you use pistons to simulate recoil -- firing the weapon makes them go "whirrrrr".
I'm not talking about just speed. I want to specify the axes of rotation, the rotation speed in RPM instead of a number that behaves in an unexplained way, and whether the rotation speed is constant or accelerates. I want to be able to build a ball-and socket joint. This part should be an "ideal" physics abstraction, in the sense that it doesn't need a fancy 3D mesh to look cool, or have an offset for the rotating bit. If I configure it as a single-axis rotator, it should have an axis and a collar that spins around it, and nothing else. Save the extra polygons, most builds hide the rotators anyway. If I configure it as a ball-and-socket joint, it should be a just a sphere with a socket around it, and each of them with an attachment point.
Explosive bolts
The only way to separate subassemblies from a build, at present, is to use detachers. But they're terribly wobbly, causing your multistage rocket or bomb-carrying aircraft to look like it was put together using rubber bands. I'd like an explosive bolt part that holds things together as securely as a vice, until you activate it. Just like explosive bolts in real life.
Glad you think so, @Mustang51. It's a lot of fun playing with the new inputs. If only they added a rotator part that was like the airbrake, but could rotate through 360 degrees...
@Zanedavid Yeah, and those are just external influences. What you choose to create, what personal touches you add to it, what build quality you achieve, everything is a choice that you make, consciously or subconsciously.
@Notaleopard Flight modules below a certain mass and size just don't handle as well.
Thanks, @Topgun757
@asteroidbook345 Yep. Can't think of any -- any -- other building game that offers this level of possibilities.
Thanks, @Topgun757
@Diloph Oh well, her loss.
@TitanIncorporated Nothing to be sorry about :) I was just explaining my position.
@DerekSP The discomfort is because what people don't understand makes them uncomfortable; and beauty is always hypnotic.
@TitanIncorporated A lot of people request me to build stuff, and then get upset when I refuse (or when I say yes and then take a long time to get to it). But the thing is, I just build whatever comes to mind. If I try to accommodate requests, the game becomes no fun for me anymore. So: someday I might build a land vehicle, but don't hold me to a deadline.
@Vidal99977 Nope, just math and physics. And some programming skills.
@Zanedavid Just another day at SledDriver industries.
@DeathStalker627 You're welcome.
@Diloph Say hi to her for me.
@Diloph First I make my own tools, then I use them to make these.
@ElevatorEnthusiast488 I don't understand...?
@Tums Don't worry about it, just enjoy the build, and thanks.
+1@DeathStalker627 Yeah, that's my thruster-based or "spaceship" flight module. First explained here, latest version here.
@Hedero It's all in the description...
@Mustang51 Oh, I definitely want to render some cool, precision-machined gears.
@DeathStalker627 Really? I find it very soothing.
@Mustang51 Well, gears don't work well enough in SimplePlanes to make really impressive animations/machines, but I suppose I could fake them with rotators.
@Treadmill103 Yeah I experimented with copper/bronze shades, but they didn't stand out enough against my preferred lighting and location conditions (see GIF). And I have a tremendous, tremendous affection for the pure grey metallic finish, now perhaps infinitely better known as the "Cybertruck grey."
@Treadmill103 With a good soundtrack it gets even better...
@Mustang51 It's a lot of fun to fly around. I can stare at it for minutes at a stretch.
@Treadmill103 What do you think of this one? When you mentioned you spawned the last one somewhere to enjoy the lighting, I thought it would be good to add some flight capability. Because setting drag to false on airbrakes doesn't do anything, flight handling deteriorates quite a bit at speed.
@enzoBoeing757 Well, I think it's best when you fly it to beautiful locations with the right lighting and watch it spin in the sun's rays. I want to encourage people to fly it.
@enzoBoeing757 It's an animation sequence that takes a relatively long time to run all the way through... the 'slow reveal.' I've updated the description as well.
@enzoBoeing757 Well, if you download the build and run it, you'll see. I've added a GIF preview.
@ElevatorEnthusiast488 Very much so.
@Brendorkus Go ahead. Nothing I like better than answering (intelligent) questions.
@Brendorkus As an adult with a full-time job and many, many hobbies, I can assure you I don't have all that much time on my hands. It's not time you need to come up with something like this, it's creativity.
+3Thanks, @Davidzhang2671. Saying that makes you a very cool dude :)
@Freerider2142 I wish the cannon was more customizable, though, with a damage property and more shell types. It would be great to be able to make a railgun...
+1Thank you for saying that, @Davidzhang2671
Gives new meaning to the term "high caliber."
+1Thanks, @Alex2262. I'm going to start on actual fractals pretty soon.
@ElevatorEnthusiast488 Oh ok, but in future could you just use plain English? The point of communication is to be understood with the minimum of fuss.
@F4f879
Glowing materials
At present, if you want to make a custom shape that acts as a light (for instance, formation light strips on military aircraft, a light bar for a truck, or an abstract sculpted shape that acts like a light), you only have one option: make the shape out of beacon lights. This is very limiting, because the beacon lights' fixed shape and useless base make it impossible to make a number of shapes. If the developers simply gave us the ability to set a material's ambient property to 1, so that it would always glow at full brightness, you could turn any subassembly built out of any kind of parts into a light. A halo is not required, so it should be easy to program. So you could build light strips, spirals, globes, hemispheres, abstract sculptures, whatever.
+4@F4f879
Cosmetic movers
Sometimes you just want to animate stuff, without affecting physics. The current "mover" parts like pistons and rotators don't allow this. Want a dial for your cockpit? Simple, use a rotator. But if your build is heavy, the dial's rotation is going to impart angular momentum to the entire aircraft (or tank, or whatever). You can override this with diffuseInertiaTensors="false", but that can cause terrible lag on large/complex builds. Or say you want a sliding door for an ejection port on an automatic weapon. Right now, you can only do this with pistons, which add a horrible sound effect, and the movement can't be customized -- you can only control the speed. Pistons also break quite easily. And last but not least, all those moving parts require additional physics calculations, which cause unnecessary lag.
What I'd like is a generic, ideal "mover" part, that can be programmed to rotate or translate a subassembly in any way, without affecting physics. I'd like to be able to specify "from time 0 to 0.5 seconds, slide 0.5 units along the Z-axis at a constant speed V; from 0.5 to 0.6 seconds, rotate outwards around the Y-axis with an ease-in and ease-out for the speed;" and so on. This would allow players to build completely custom animated stuff like variable-nozzle "turkey feathers," muzzle brakes, gun recoil mechanisms, gun loading mechanisms, rotating radars on Star Wars builds, sliding and rotating doors, moving eyes in robot heads, and so on. They should also come with a library of sound effects to choose from, and the ability to make them completely silent as well. Few things set my teeth on edge like activating a piston or rotator in SP and hearing that awful whirring noise that can completely break immmersion, as when you use pistons to simulate recoil -- firing the weapon makes them go "whirrrrr".
+4@F4f879
Configurable rotators
I'm not talking about just speed. I want to specify the axes of rotation, the rotation speed in RPM instead of a number that behaves in an unexplained way, and whether the rotation speed is constant or accelerates. I want to be able to build a ball-and socket joint. This part should be an "ideal" physics abstraction, in the sense that it doesn't need a fancy 3D mesh to look cool, or have an offset for the rotating bit. If I configure it as a single-axis rotator, it should have an axis and a collar that spins around it, and nothing else. Save the extra polygons, most builds hide the rotators anyway. If I configure it as a ball-and-socket joint, it should be a just a sphere with a socket around it, and each of them with an attachment point.
Explosive bolts
The only way to separate subassemblies from a build, at present, is to use detachers. But they're terribly wobbly, causing your multistage rocket or bomb-carrying aircraft to look like it was put together using rubber bands. I'd like an explosive bolt part that holds things together as securely as a vice, until you activate it. Just like explosive bolts in real life.
+3Always good to see something out of the ordinary on SP.
+1Thanks, @ACEPILOT109 @jhM648
@Mustang51 Oh, I have a bunch of parts I feel the severe lack of, that if added to the game would take it to a whole other level.
+1@ElevatorEnthusiast488 Thanks. Did you mean ⠉⠕⠝⠞⠑⠝⠞, though?
@asteroidbook345 You mean airbrakes...
@tylerdeveneuxmusic I'm not sure what it is either :) I just thought it looked fascinating.
+1Glad you think so, @Mustang51. It's a lot of fun playing with the new inputs. If only they added a rotator part that was like the airbrake, but could rotate through 360 degrees...
+1@Potkuri It does look alive, doesn't it? One of the names I came up with was "Sines of life," but I thought that would be too corny.
Glad you think so, @Vidal99977
+1Thanks, @Mercyaircraftcorporation
@Zanedavid Yeah, and those are just external influences. What you choose to create, what personal touches you add to it, what build quality you achieve, everything is a choice that you make, consciously or subconsciously.