People will upvote what they want. Do you seriously think your opinion is more important than other people's? I'm getting so tired of these I think it's unfair that <x> got more upvotes than <y> waaa posts. Either build something that people will upvote, or just acknowledge that you can play the game without being controlled by the upvote button or the points counter.
There are several problems with this idea.
1. It would degrade the openness of the community. Restricting what others can do with your things is one step on the way to isolating the community. There is no such thing as "intellectual property" in SimplePlanes, anyone can use an idea that is out there. You can't copyright or patent a paint scheme or mechanism. Reverse engineering is allowed, and all this could change with that.
2. It would be a nightmare to implement technically. To prevent people accessing the actual plane.... There's so many points where the user could intercept the transmission of the aircraft file and circumvent the system. For instance:
- The website must send the XML file to the game. The user, with freely available software, can intercept all communications between the game and the Internet (Wireshark, Telerick Fiddler)
- Mods. Mods can interact with, read, and in more advanced cases I have tried, even modify the game's code. The only realistic way to prevent theft by specialised mods is to disable mods altogether.
- Storage. Where is the file stored? How does the game tell if the user can edit it or not? The successor system can be bypassed by simple XML, so can this system be too? The good thing about SP is that everything is accessible, human-readable (not a chunk of encoded binary), and editable. Preventing the users from simply copying out the XML code into an editable craft file would mean the files would need to be stored somewhere the users aren't able to edit them, maybe encrypted, encoded.
SimplePlanes is such an open game. Once you have the game, there is no limits to what you can do. A restriction like this would mean so many things would need to be locked down.... It just wouldn't be the same.
It just won't work. Sorry.
More parts =/= good
Crafts with less parts run better, and allow more people to play with them, or to play on higher graphics settings. Also, your post has only been up for 8 hours, as opposed to the other one's 8 months. People are also more likely to go and upvote things that are new or unique instead of things that have been done before.
Knowing the SP drag system it's probably in a unit like cobwebs per ancient scripture. I don't think number-matching to a drag value is feasible. I think your best bet for performance matching is to match the other characteristics like wing area, mass and thrust, then adjust drag scale experimentally to match characteristics like glide ratio or "top speed" (presuming this is limited by power and not structure).
I dunno, I don't agree with this, old builds are always there and they work fine... it'd be insane not to seek something better just because it'd make older crafts "irrelevant" or something. It's like disliking faster computers because they made Half Life 1 irrelevant. You can still just download HL1 and play it. It's still there, like it always was. And if you own SimplePlanes, you'll always own SimplePlanes, and you'll always be able to use your builds, as they were made, in SP.
It might be frustrating if you were in the middle of a build when something came along, but my only advice for that is that it's not a job, build for fun and if it's not fun then either make it fun or wait until we do.
It's all based on experimental data. If I had to guess it could be that there's 24 individually moving nozzle flaps that aren't combined into the part group mesh like most parts are.
@Lanc you don't need to ping me a second time about the same thing, and you do not speak for all SP users. Your perspective here is narrow and based on how much you like SP vs SR2. I mean of course the SP community perfers SP? SP is over 7 years old and SR2 is still in early-access. If SR2 has put "less food on the table" then maybe that's because it isn't finished and we should work on it more. Regardless, I'm not in charge of Jundroo's long term plan but I'm pretty sure we aren't going to drop this entire project just because someone with a two-day old account said so.
@LastManStanding your post is only going to be removed if it breaks the rules. If it broke the rules, then you lose your points. Don't break the rules and this will never affect you. (Also, if you remove it yourself in an attempt to keep the points even though it broke the rules, we can still remove the points after that.)
What that is is the post ID for the biography, as the biography is handled similar to other posts like forums for the purposes of editing, reporting, removing etc. Users existed well before biographies implemented into the site so this isn't an accurate indicator of when an account was created, more so when their bio was created. Note that also post IDs are shared between all posts, so post ID 1 million doesn't make it the millionth user. here's an old archive page of the site before biographies existed
As trivia: The first account created on the site is AndrewGarrison. Followed by PhilipTarpley, and an old account of Nathan's. First user account was HellFireKoder, followed by Nassassin.
Upvotes are designed to show builds that deserve them, that people have put effort into. They are not just a reward to hand out regardless, something to trade. If you actually took the time to download something and test it out before you click upvote, you'd never see a cooldown.
Not really sure what you're looking at but of course the "structure" is a mess because you're using an asset extractor. Which doesn't tell you whether something is new or not. I think pretty much all the "new" stuff you're on about is very very old.
There's no way a build could have malware, the worst it can do is crash the game by being too big for your device to handle, et cetera, at which point the game would probably crash and revert. Mods however, can run code on your system, so treat downloading mods with the same care you take when installing software - it's the same premise.
Imagine editing compliments about yourself into a Wikipedia page and then not having the attention span to wait more than 3 hours to pretend you "just found it while browsing" and not sound suspicious
.
1 - Removing an upvote will remove the points it gave when that users points next update
2 - Here's a super old video of SP https://youtu.be/clglambOTHA, on Andrew's channel. This was well before my time (I joined between 2 and 3 years ago) but it gives you some idea of when the game was being initially developed. Jundroo had already made a number of engineering/building games including the original SimpleRockets, so it was probably a continuation of this trend, upped to 3d.
3 - Don't know, probably a test mod. Mods section is relatively new (on the timescale of the game's lifetime). Previously they were on the forums, and maybe even on the subreddit before that.
4 (and 5) - Depends what the mod is and who makes it. Mods can do basically anything if you know how to do said thing. It's not about what a mod can do but what the person making the mod makes it do.
7 - There's no hard limit, just what system resources can handle. It'd definitely blow up over 2147483647 since integer indexing would overflow but you'd run out of memory way way before then.
8 - Don't know
9 - I think it's this one - it was uploaded before accounts were a thing so nobody has the points from it, but I think it was Andrew's.
10 - no clue, and "release" is a relative term given it was released at different times on android/ios, gumroad, then steam, and also other app stores like amazon and GOG.
11 - dunno. Probably by Andrew because he's the one that does the website development.
in terms of "reducing part counts" SP pretty much already does this behind the scenes. Parts that don't have rotators, detachers or other physics-related joints between them are combined into a single physics body during flight, which greatly reduces the physics processing. Within these bodies there are part groups which are automatically generated. A part group is the smallest unit of parts that can "break off" of from the craft, and this means all of the parts in a group can be actually combined into a single mesh (3d object) to reduce the amount of draw calls sent to the GPU. This all happens automatically as the aircraft is loaded into the game.
Deleting swathes of accounts is going to save a little on storage costs (not compute) but the act of regularly cleaning them out, including developing the code to detect them as well as actually scanning the database would probably use more energy than it's worth. The search simply embeds a Google Custom Search - that is out of jundroo's control how many pages it returns.
Also, setting dragScale=0 won't affect performance that much since drag calculations are the same except the force never gets applied, but calculateDrag=false means that it's excluded from drag entirely. As well as causing parts behind it to get drag, this also will improve performance (mostly load times) of builds if you set it on most parts and only leave a few parts that define your drag model on.
@Jim1the1Squid could you please not tag every moderator and developer on the site whenever something you don't like happens. Biographies are removed when they break the rules. I'd think that would be fairly obvious. We can see your bio still, and if it isn't breaking the rules we might re-approve it. But if it stays removed, I guess you'll know why.
argh, this idea has been put forward so many times..... It would have been done by now if it was gonna improve performance that much. Oh wait. The game already does that, you just don't notice, because it's clever and does it in the background...
None of this is possible in the stock game, unfortunately.
But I'm a modder so let's have some fun! I have a side project that adds a lua scripting environment inside the game, accessible via placing a "processor" part. One of the first things I added to it was the ability to "disconnect" the input of a rotator/engine/whatever and provide your own. So you can override rotators. With this, I have been having some fun lately. For instance, I built a quadcopter but instead of using a gyro I made my own stabilisation code which directly controlled the rotors. And yes, I have also made an aimbot, which is rather... accurate. It "leads the target" (aims in front of it to hit a moving target) so it's very effective and dangerous. It can even take down incoming missiles. I spawned one as AI and fired 8 missiles at it from 1 mile away. It shot them all down, then me. Unfortunately I'm currently working on two other mods... But it's not too far down the list. Oh, and I managed to use it to take down 163 enemies on the gun training level.
@TheTomatoLover there's not much that can't be added, it's just a question of how much time it would take and if that's worth it versus how much we want it. In this case, there is the extra issue that the underwater part of the SP map was never designed to be seen, the terrains simply end. That was fine when you couldn't see underwater, but allowing the camera underwater in the stock game would push that into bug territory
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:
Fuselage cutting never removed any options to the game, only added more.
I started work on the fuselage cutter after pondering solutions to the issue of easily making hollow cockpits – necessary to lower the skill barrier to making planes with detailed cockpits – a necessary change for the launch of SimplePlanes VR. Countless people had asked for a mesh subtraction feature, but this was always seen as complex and time consuming to implement, the interface would also be complex to use and there are technical constraints that would make life hard; such as PhysX not supporting dynamic concave meshes – subtracting one mesh shape from another can produce a concave shape even if both initial shapes are convex. I picked clipping by a flat plane because it’s the simplest 3d clipping, which made implementing the algorithm with the particular quirks of SP’s mesh system achievable. Also, clipping a convex mesh by a flat plane will always yield flat planes, which fixes the collider issue. It was only after this investigation that I came up with the idea of defining the plane using sliders in the same way in the UI as width, height or corner radius.
Understand that you’re playing ‘SimplePlanes’ and although you, and other players who put such huge amounts of effort into getting their planes to precisely match real life, are important to us and we’re always impressed with what you manage – naturally, you are pushing the game to its limit. And that can be fun. But remember, this a PC/mobile game about snapping blocks together and flying them.
I don’t understand your complaints about other people’s builds being ‘lazy’ since 1.11 – I’ve only seen top-end quality permeate across to a much wider range of people.
There are definitely some annoyances to the workflow in building in SP, especially at the high end. And we’d all love to have everything work as flawlessly as possible but we have a lot of other things deserving of our time to work on – personally I’m also at university now too, so the time I do get is stretched even thinner.
Everyone enjoys the game differently and everyone’s free to do that. We play games for fun and if you’re not enjoying it, simply don’t play. It’s not like you’re paying Jundroo a subscription or anything – I’d absolutely prefer players to not burn themselves out, and maybe pop back in once in a while to check out what we’ve been up to :)
And secondly, about your comments on Flyout (which seem to have changed since I wrote most of this):
Flyout and SimplePlanes are at heart different games with different target groups they appeal to
Of course, there is overlap between these groups – and you’re free to play one, the other, or both! This isn’t a romantic relationship or an exclusive contract, and barely anyone plays just one game
In addition, there are many other games that also overlap with SP’s fanbase, like War Thunder, KSP, SR2, Besiege, Homebrew, and I’m sure countless I haven’t named. And that’s fine. I play other games too.
In particular, I think Flyout definitely has a lot of appeal to the people like you who want to design their aircraft in a more technical way (this would explain your perspective on it)
In addition to targeting a different (though overlapping) audience, Flyout (as far as I know) isn’t targeting the mobile market.
To summarise, Flyout looks like a nice game and I’m sure plenty of people who play SimplePlanes will give it a go – this isn’t some sort of cult. To paraphrase what you said earlier, my metaphorical pants will remain un-pooped.
@Dad it was hard making the selected material... I wanted people to be able to see the unedited glass material when it was selected so they could tweak the opacity slider and see how it looks. If there's problems with depth perception I guess we better add VR lmao.
I also don't get how the auto-hide feature makes panelling difficult. If you set override hide, then it's basically disabled.
God dammit Andrew, I leave the fort for a minute and this!
+51People will upvote what they want. Do you seriously think your opinion is more important than other people's? I'm getting so tired of these I think it's unfair that <x> got more upvotes than <y> waaa posts. Either build something that people will upvote, or just acknowledge that you can play the game without being controlled by the upvote button or the points counter.
+46It's not like we're making the same helicopter or anything, you're doing the ugly naval one!
+32There are several problems with this idea.
1. It would degrade the openness of the community. Restricting what others can do with your things is one step on the way to isolating the community. There is no such thing as "intellectual property" in SimplePlanes, anyone can use an idea that is out there. You can't copyright or patent a paint scheme or mechanism. Reverse engineering is allowed, and all this could change with that.
2. It would be a nightmare to implement technically. To prevent people accessing the actual plane.... There's so many points where the user could intercept the transmission of the aircraft file and circumvent the system. For instance:
- The website must send the XML file to the game. The user, with freely available software, can intercept all communications between the game and the Internet (Wireshark, Telerick Fiddler)
- Mods. Mods can interact with, read, and in more advanced cases I have tried, even modify the game's code. The only realistic way to prevent theft by specialised mods is to disable mods altogether.
- Storage. Where is the file stored? How does the game tell if the user can edit it or not? The successor system can be bypassed by simple XML, so can this system be too? The good thing about SP is that everything is accessible, human-readable (not a chunk of encoded binary), and editable. Preventing the users from simply copying out the XML code into an editable craft file would mean the files would need to be stored somewhere the users aren't able to edit them, maybe encrypted, encoded.
SimplePlanes is such an open game. Once you have the game, there is no limits to what you can do. A restriction like this would mean so many things would need to be locked down.... It just wouldn't be the same.
+30It just won't work. Sorry.
@LotusCarsSub please get back to us when food, water, houses, electricity, computers, and clothes are free.
+29Who's on the sphinx again?
+28I'm surprised you're not more confused about the 16 extra employees we've been hiding in the basement, if that website is correct.
+22More parts =/= good
+21Crafts with less parts run better, and allow more people to play with them, or to play on higher graphics settings. Also, your post has only been up for 8 hours, as opposed to the other one's 8 months. People are also more likely to go and upvote things that are new or unique instead of things that have been done before.
@Lwillswith2sentryguns yes, I see no reason to make the game online-only.
+19lmfao wait until these people hear about mod support
+19I'd just like to say that no, this was not modded gameplay
+19All I know is what colour the mushrooms are. And I'm not even allowed to tell you that.
+18@ChrisPy that's when I steal his unlisted upload to fly myself
+17Knowing the SP drag system it's probably in a unit like cobwebs per ancient scripture. I don't think number-matching to a drag value is feasible. I think your best bet for performance matching is to match the other characteristics like wing area, mass and thrust, then adjust drag scale experimentally to match characteristics like glide ratio or "top speed" (presuming this is limited by power and not structure).
+17I dunno, I don't agree with this, old builds are always there and they work fine... it'd be insane not to seek something better just because it'd make older crafts "irrelevant" or something. It's like disliking faster computers because they made Half Life 1 irrelevant. You can still just download HL1 and play it. It's still there, like it always was. And if you own SimplePlanes, you'll always own SimplePlanes, and you'll always be able to use your builds, as they were made, in SP.
It might be frustrating if you were in the middle of a build when something came along, but my only advice for that is that it's not a job, build for fun and if it's not fun then either make it fun or wait until we do.
+16It's all based on experimental data. If I had to guess it could be that there's 24 individually moving nozzle flaps that aren't combined into the part group mesh like most parts are.
+16Climate change solved, you're welcome
+16@Lanc you don't need to ping me a second time about the same thing, and you do not speak for all SP users. Your perspective here is narrow and based on how much you like SP vs SR2. I mean of course the SP community perfers SP? SP is over 7 years old and SR2 is still in early-access. If SR2 has put "less food on the table" then maybe that's because it isn't finished and we should work on it more. Regardless, I'm not in charge of Jundroo's long term plan but I'm pretty sure we aren't going to drop this entire project just because someone with a two-day old account said so.
+16@LastManStanding your post is only going to be removed if it breaks the rules. If it broke the rules, then you lose your points. Don't break the rules and this will never affect you. (Also, if you remove it yourself in an attempt to keep the points even though it broke the rules, we can still remove the points after that.)
+15i think you would lose money if you bet that
+14What that is is the post ID for the biography, as the biography is handled similar to other posts like forums for the purposes of editing, reporting, removing etc. Users existed well before biographies implemented into the site so this isn't an accurate indicator of when an account was created, more so when their bio was created. Note that also post IDs are shared between all posts, so post ID 1 million doesn't make it the millionth user.
+14here's an old archive page of the site before biographies existed
As trivia: The first account created on the site is AndrewGarrison. Followed by PhilipTarpley, and an old account of Nathan's. First user account was HellFireKoder, followed by Nassassin.
lol
+14Amazing. In hindsight it was inevitable but now it's been done. And well.
+13@Aviator720 since you're not the first person to say this I'm just going to refer you to some of my previous comments that should fill you in:
+13what we're doing
people asking about flyout
more about flyout (half a year ago)
I suppose it was only a matter of time
+13Upvotes are designed to show builds that deserve them, that people have put effort into. They are not just a reward to hand out regardless, something to trade. If you actually took the time to download something and test it out before you click upvote, you'd never see a cooldown.
+13there is the usual, pitch/roll/throttle/vtol/trim/yaw etc. There is also
+13we do a little trolling
+12This would cause old links to break which is not ideal. If you don't want something on your account page, try not setting it as your username
+12Not really sure what you're looking at but of course the "structure" is a mess because you're using an asset extractor. Which doesn't tell you whether something is new or not. I think pretty much all the "new" stuff you're on about is very very old.
+12I hope you are as excited as we are to join us on this exciting new part of our SimplePlanes journey!
+12There's no way a build could have malware, the worst it can do is crash the game by being too big for your device to handle, et cetera, at which point the game would probably crash and revert. Mods however, can run code on your system, so treat downloading mods with the same care you take when installing software - it's the same premise.
+12Imagine editing compliments about yourself into a Wikipedia page and then not having the attention span to wait more than 3 hours to pretend you "just found it while browsing" and not sound suspicious
+11.
+111 - Removing an upvote will remove the points it gave when that users points next update
2 - Here's a super old video of SP https://youtu.be/clglambOTHA, on Andrew's channel. This was well before my time (I joined between 2 and 3 years ago) but it gives you some idea of when the game was being initially developed. Jundroo had already made a number of engineering/building games including the original SimpleRockets, so it was probably a continuation of this trend, upped to 3d.
3 - Don't know, probably a test mod. Mods section is relatively new (on the timescale of the game's lifetime). Previously they were on the forums, and maybe even on the subreddit before that.
4 (and 5) - Depends what the mod is and who makes it. Mods can do basically anything if you know how to do said thing. It's not about what a mod can do but what the person making the mod makes it do.
7 - There's no hard limit, just what system resources can handle. It'd definitely blow up over 2147483647 since integer indexing would overflow but you'd run out of memory way way before then.
8 - Don't know
9 - I think it's this one - it was uploaded before accounts were a thing so nobody has the points from it, but I think it was Andrew's.
10 - no clue, and "release" is a relative term given it was released at different times on android/ios, gumroad, then steam, and also other app stores like amazon and GOG.
11 - dunno. Probably by Andrew because he's the one that does the website development.
in terms of "reducing part counts" SP pretty much already does this behind the scenes. Parts that don't have rotators, detachers or other physics-related joints between them are combined into a single physics body during flight, which greatly reduces the physics processing. Within these bodies there are part groups which are automatically generated. A part group is the smallest unit of parts that can "break off" of from the craft, and this means all of the parts in a group can be actually combined into a single mesh (3d object) to reduce the amount of draw calls sent to the GPU. This all happens automatically as the aircraft is loaded into the game.
+11You don't get bored of some things
+11Deleting swathes of accounts is going to save a little on storage costs (not compute) but the act of regularly cleaning them out, including developing the code to detect them as well as actually scanning the database would probably use more energy than it's worth. The search simply embeds a Google Custom Search - that is out of jundroo's control how many pages it returns.
+11@Aviator720 hi, I explained in the last section of the post why we haven't been able to bring new features to SP.
+10sike, you thought
+10(fr this time though)
Yeah if it's a comment like that with an advertising link just drop a report and the account should be banned if it is just an ad bot.
+10@KeanuMiis you know I was quoting you there, right?
+10Interceptor:
Guardian:
Inferno:
Cleaver:
+10Also, setting
+10dragScale=0won't affect performance that much since drag calculations are the same except the force never gets applied, butcalculateDrag=falsemeans that it's excluded from drag entirely. As well as causing parts behind it to get drag, this also will improve performance (mostly load times) of builds if you set it on most parts and only leave a few parts that define your drag model on.@Jim1the1Squid could you please not tag every moderator and developer on the site whenever something you don't like happens. Biographies are removed when they break the rules. I'd think that would be fairly obvious. We can see your bio still, and if it isn't breaking the rules we might re-approve it. But if it stays removed, I guess you'll know why.
+10argh, this idea has been put forward so many times..... It would have been done by now if it was gonna improve performance that much. Oh wait. The game already does that, you just don't notice, because it's clever and does it in the background...
+10None of this is possible in the stock game, unfortunately.
+10But I'm a modder so let's have some fun! I have a side project that adds a lua scripting environment inside the game, accessible via placing a "processor" part. One of the first things I added to it was the ability to "disconnect" the input of a rotator/engine/whatever and provide your own. So you can override rotators. With this, I have been having some fun lately. For instance, I built a quadcopter but instead of using a gyro I made my own stabilisation code which directly controlled the rotors. And yes, I have also made an aimbot, which is rather... accurate. It "leads the target" (aims in front of it to hit a moving target) so it's very effective and dangerous. It can even take down incoming missiles. I spawned one as AI and fired 8 missiles at it from 1 mile away. It shot them all down, then me. Unfortunately I'm currently working on two other mods... But it's not too far down the list. Oh, and I managed to use it to take down 163 enemies on the gun training level.
simple planes 2
+9@TheTomatoLover there's not much that can't be added, it's just a question of how much time it would take and if that's worth it versus how much we want it. In this case, there is the extra issue that the underwater part of the SP map was never designed to be seen, the terrains simply end. That was fine when you couldn't see underwater, but allowing the camera underwater in the stock game would push that into bug territory
+9I 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):
- Flyout and SimplePlanes are at heart different games with different target groups they appeal to
- Of course, there is overlap between these groups – and you’re free to play one, the other, or both! This isn’t a romantic relationship or an exclusive contract, and barely anyone plays just one game
- In addition, there are many other games that also overlap with SP’s fanbase, like War Thunder, KSP, SR2, Besiege, Homebrew, and I’m sure countless I haven’t named. And that’s fine. I play other games too.
- In particular, I think Flyout definitely has a lot of appeal to the people like you who want to design their aircraft in a more technical way (this would explain your perspective on it)
- In addition to targeting a different (though overlapping) audience, Flyout (as far as I know) isn’t targeting the mobile market.
- To summarise, Flyout looks like a nice game and I’m sure plenty of people who play SimplePlanes will give it a go – this isn’t some sort of cult. To paraphrase what you said earlier, my metaphorical pants will remain un-pooped.
+9@Dad it was hard making the selected material... I wanted people to be able to see the unedited glass material when it was selected so they could tweak the opacity slider and see how it looks. If there's problems with depth perception I guess we better add VR lmao.
I also don't get how the auto-hide feature makes panelling difficult. If you set override hide, then it's basically disabled.
+9