@icouldntthinkofaname the devs asked a while back if anyone ever actually ever used the RCN toggle, and the general consensus was no. As such they assigned it to an action group that could be used for other things too, should you want
I'm glad you liked it. I can confirm the other answers, it was done through extensive xml editing. You can edit the xml with any text editor - even Word if you want - but something like Notepad++ usually makes it easiest. Latent is really good at this stuff, check out his Do-335
@Misha1004 all I did was do a find-and-replace for "Wing-3" to "Wing-2" in the XML. What that does is turns every wing in to a structural wing, without getting rid of control surfaces. Yes, of course you can upload it
Here you go. All I did was make the wings stronger, so it could do with some more work to get it flying well. I figured you'd rather do that yourself, though.
@Droslash it does look good. It flies alright too, but I'm confused aboiut a couple of things:
Why is there quite so much dead weight in the nose?
Why do you have those pitch control surfaces on the main wings?
I found that it flew really nicely once the dead weight was reduced from 2000lbs to 500lbs, the pitch control surfaces on the main wing were removed, and the ones on the stabilisers were reduced in size just a little bit
That's for a fuselage block. So, to break that down bit by bit:
Part id="2" - every part has a number to identify it.
partType="Fuselage-Body-1" - this identifies the type of part.
position="0,2.743354,0.7562499" rotation="0,0,0" - these define where the part is and how it is rotated.
drag="0.1292781,0.1292781,2.755342,2.755342,5.156407,5.156409" - I don't think drag can be changed, because it is reset when you load up the level.
materials="0" - the colour.
FuelTank.State fuel="0" capacity="0" - how much fuel the part holds. I'm not sure what the difference between these two is, I've never really played with it.
Fuselage.State frontScale="2,4" rearScale="2,3.34" offset="0,-0.33,6.5" - the front width and height, back width and height, then the offset, which defines the length, run, and rise.
@FullFruntall that video was awesome. I think we have sort of achieved the manouevrability of birds, though - in small quadcopters, rather than big jets. Even those couldn't do what that hawk did, though.
Small anecdote, that video brought back a lot of good memories for me, because I was the hole at a falconry exhibition. They me hold my hand on hip with my elbow out, so that a peregrine could fly through the gap
@AdamBomb that was an interesting story. I like that you actually did something different from all of the other channels just flying a selection of planes about, too. Maybe an interesting idea would be to do the dogfight against the other plane in the story? Doing a couple of runs with AI vs AI battles could be a good way to get footage of both planes.
Videos are definitely allowed! Having a tag for it would be a bit weird otherwise. Spamming a whole ton would be frowned upon, but posting something you put effort in to and want to share is totally cool. I'll go watch it.
@goboygo1 that only happened because I was hoping to get a lock before it reached me, but I was definitely proud of it haha.
@FullFruntall sorry, this was just the first time I took it out. It was only meant to be for General, rather than a demonstration of the features or anything. I just uploaded it because it came out quite nicely.
To add to what FullFruntall said, real planes don't usually use yaw for steering. Your yaw surfaces will normally be very small and very far back, so it's just like trying to pitch with nothing but one tiny wing right at the back of your plane, on just one side.
As for making it work in SP, FullFruntall's suggestions are the best ideas, as far as I know.
@Zmaj I tried your plane out and it's a decent build, nice job. I agree with both of Rocket's suggestions - having the rear landing gear just a little bit behind the CoM makes taking off a lot easier, and all that dead weight at the front is reducing your ability to turn. I took absolutely all of the dead weight out, took the fuel out of the wings, and added fuel to the front. It came out about 1,000lbs lighter with a CoL this this. I also reduced the size of the control surfaces a bit, to make it easier to control. If the plane is wobbling about when you pitch, that usually means your control surfaces need to be a little smaller. I hope this helps, it's a great plane!
Alright, nice work dude. I made the changes you asked for and a couple of others here. I tried to keep the flight characteristics as close as possible to this, I think you pretty much nailed them
@AnarchistAerospaceIndustries I'm having some issues with the game resetting XML edits I make just now, but Authros made a pretty good one a while back
@Droslash ah cool, well in that case you'll find your files in C:\Users[you]\AppData\LocalLow\Jundroo\SimplePlanes\AircraftDesigns. Anyway, on with a shortened
ROUND 2
Resizing, Moving, and Rotating Parts
I don't think much explanation will be needed for moving parts. Change the coordinates after "position" and it will move that way. Rotation work the same way, but it can be really difficult to work out which coordinate will do what. I'm afraid I don't have a good answer for this, you'll just need to experiment. Note that mirroring parts that have been rotated in the XML usually acts weirdly, and you'll have to fix the rotation of the mirrored ones a lot of the time.
Resizing fuselage blocks and wings is nice and easy too. Fuselage blocks have three parameters: frontScale, rearScale, and offset. The first two are the height and width at each end, the third covers the length, rise, and run. Wings have five parameters: rootLeadingOffset, rootTrailingOffset, tipLeadingOffset, tipTrailingOffset, and offset. The first four cover the width of the wing at each end, the last one covers the length, dihedral, and sweep of the wing.
Other Stuff
Connections: you can connect parts manually, regardless of their placement, near the end of the xml. I'm not sure how the connection points work, so I usually find that it's best to try to copy an existing similar relationship and change the part IDs that you need. This is useful when you have mirrored moved or rotated parts, because those usually don't retain their connections.
Colours: going to the bottom of the file and changing the r, m, and s values all to 1 will make your colour incredibly shiny, like this. It won't show up on mobile, but it's kinda fun.
I had more stuff written out but I can't remember what it was. Feel free to ask questions, and I hope this helps.
Jesus christ, apparently I just found out the hard way that comments have a characters limit. I'll come back and sort it once I get over how much text just got deleted.
@Droslash I see that you're on OSX, so I don't know where your files will be stored - maybe @NovaTopaz could help with that? - but I'll write up roughly how I go about it for when you find them. Everyone does stuff in different ways, of course, so experiment and see what works for you.
Getting Started
So the basic idea here is that you save your plane, open up the save for that plane in a text editor, change something, save it in the text editor, then reload it in SimplePlanes. You can keep SP open the whole time, just load the plane again to update to reflect the changes you made.
Identifying Parts in the XML
The first issue to solve is being able to actually find the parts you want to edit. Looking through the XML and just seeing a huge wall of numbered fuselages and wings isn't really helpful. Typically what I do is paint literally every part of the whole plane in one colour, preferably something easy to ignore like white or grey, using the first slot in the colour palette. Anything that I want to edit gets a unique colour, going through the palette in order from left to right. What this does is makes sure that the "Materials" parameter for all of the parts can be used to identify what you want to edit. Anything painted in the colour you want to ignore will have " materials="0" ", and the part using the next colour will be " materials = "1" ". This means you can do cmd+f with
ls="1
or whatever other number you want to find, and it'll take you right there.
Engines
Lots of people like their planes to just be faster. This is also probably the easiest thing to do. With jets, you can literally just change the value for "max" to allow as much thrust as you want. Setting it to 2 will double your max thrust. Props have a couple more settings, and I've never really played with those much, but generally increasing max thrust, rpm, and power will make it go faster. Experiment and see what works! Note, however, that increasing max thrust does not speed up the time it takes for an engine to actually reach the thrust you want. Setting max thrust to 10 will make it take 10 times longer to reach max thrust. VTOL jets are popular because they adjust very quickly, so they don't suffer from this so much.
@NovaTopaz oh, that would be perfect for new folk! Regarding xml in Steam, have you had other issues with it? This is the first time I've had any trouble with it whatsoever, and it's such a weird thing to go wrong
@osame oh I didn't see it! Tags only work in comments, I think. I don't have my laptop to test it just now, but I shall try it out tomorrow
@Planeengineer31625324 but we have no way of knowing what your challenge actually is
Nobody is forcing you to shoot anything. You're totally free to build and fly unarmed planes if you like. It just gives you more options
@AviownCorp nope
That's awesome, I am all kinds of hyped for this
@icouldntthinkofaname the devs asked a while back if anyone ever actually ever used the RCN toggle, and the general consensus was no. As such they assigned it to an action group that could be used for other things too, should you want
I think you're missing some kind of description here
Use the Share button at the top of the left-hand menu in the builder
@ronyseptian17 @AviownCorp I don't know, but I haven't watched that dev notes post yet. Is there a mobile beta?
Sure
Bloody hell dude, best of luck with this. We'll all be behind you
@Flightsonic I did, I used Inkscape. It's a free DTP program and pretty good for vector art
Battle Engine Aquila!
Later this month, the devs are working on it
@Droslash sweet, I'm glad I could help. It's a cool plane, I felt like the potential just needed unlocking a little
I did, yeah. I thought something was broken at first and kept trying to fix it haha
@Nickasaurus I don't! I was just messing about it was misunderstood. We got it sorted on another post
@Misha1004 no worries, you're welcome
I'm glad you liked it. I can confirm the other answers, it was done through extensive xml editing. You can edit the xml with any text editor - even Word if you want - but something like Notepad++ usually makes it easiest. Latent is really good at this stuff, check out his Do-335
@Misha1004 all I did was do a find-and-replace for "Wing-3" to "Wing-2" in the XML. What that does is turns every wing in to a structural wing, without getting rid of control surfaces. Yes, of course you can upload it
@Kimo @Noman0rumeral @ElGatoVolador thanks guys
@Rifqigamers1 cheers!
Update: the smoke mod is finished!
Here you go. All I did was make the wings stronger, so it could do with some more work to get it flying well. I figured you'd rather do that yourself, though.
@Droslash it does look good. It flies alright too, but I'm confused aboiut a couple of things:
Why is there quite so much dead weight in the nose?
Why do you have those pitch control surfaces on the main wings?
I found that it flew really nicely once the dead weight was reduced from 2000lbs to 500lbs, the pitch control surfaces on the main wing were removed, and the ones on the stabilisers were reduced in size just a little bit
How about this?
@VelocityFlight
1) It may be different between phones, but on mine I can pick Internal Storage from the menu on the left in File Explorer.
2) Should do
3) An example from one of my planes:
That's for a fuselage block. So, to break that down bit by bit:
Part id="2" - every part has a number to identify it.
partType="Fuselage-Body-1" - this identifies the type of part.
position="0,2.743354,0.7562499" rotation="0,0,0" - these define where the part is and how it is rotated.
drag="0.1292781,0.1292781,2.755342,2.755342,5.156407,5.156409" - I don't think drag can be changed, because it is reset when you load up the level.
materials="0" - the colour.
FuelTank.State fuel="0" capacity="0" - how much fuel the part holds. I'm not sure what the difference between these two is, I've never really played with it.
Fuselage.State frontScale="2,4" rearScale="2,3.34" offset="0,-0.33,6.5" - the front width and height, back width and height, then the offset, which defines the length, run, and rise.
deadWeight="0" buoyancy="0" buoyancy="0" fuelPercentage="0" - pretty obvious
cornerTypes="2,1,1,2,2,2,2,2" - 0 is hard, 1 is smooth, 2 is curved.
@Zmaj here you go
@Sirstupid that is the best idea I have heard in ages
@FredDeaneBritishReplicasCo solid looking list there, I'll be keeping an eye out
@FullFruntall that video was awesome. I think we have sort of achieved the manouevrability of birds, though - in small quadcopters, rather than big jets. Even those couldn't do what that hawk did, though.
Small anecdote, that video brought back a lot of good memories for me, because I was the hole at a falconry exhibition. They me hold my hand on hip with my elbow out, so that a peregrine could fly through the gap
@Zmaj I didn't save it, but give me a little bit and I'll remake it
@AdamBomb that was an interesting story. I like that you actually did something different from all of the other channels just flying a selection of planes about, too. Maybe an interesting idea would be to do the dogfight against the other plane in the story? Doing a couple of runs with AI vs AI battles could be a good way to get footage of both planes.
@Droslash no bother dude, I'm glad they could be useful. I'll go test this out after I've eaten
Clickable link
Videos are definitely allowed! Having a tag for it would be a bit weird otherwise. Spamming a whole ton would be frowned upon, but posting something you put effort in to and want to share is totally cool. I'll go watch it.
@bjac0 yeah, sorry if it came across really badly
@goboygo1 that only happened because I was hoping to get a lock before it reached me, but I was definitely proud of it haha.
@FullFruntall sorry, this was just the first time I took it out. It was only meant to be for General, rather than a demonstration of the features or anything. I just uploaded it because it came out quite nicely.
@goboygo1 @Waemoth usually mirroring the plane from the opposite side from normal fixes this. I have no idea why, though
To add to what FullFruntall said, real planes don't usually use yaw for steering. Your yaw surfaces will normally be very small and very far back, so it's just like trying to pitch with nothing but one tiny wing right at the back of your plane, on just one side.
As for making it work in SP, FullFruntall's suggestions are the best ideas, as far as I know.
Just in case you're not on PC, I posted a guide on how to do this without nudging or XML editing a while back
@LiberatorWeaponAgency no worries. I don't need repaid, just have fun with the game and try to help other people when you can
@Zmaj I tried your plane out and it's a decent build, nice job. I agree with both of Rocket's suggestions - having the rear landing gear just a little bit behind the CoM makes taking off a lot easier, and all that dead weight at the front is reducing your ability to turn. I took absolutely all of the dead weight out, took the fuel out of the wings, and added fuel to the front. It came out about 1,000lbs lighter with a CoL this this. I also reduced the size of the control surfaces a bit, to make it easier to control. If the plane is wobbling about when you pitch, that usually means your control surfaces need to be a little smaller. I hope this helps, it's a great plane!
Alright, nice work dude. I made the changes you asked for and a couple of others here. I tried to keep the flight characteristics as close as possible to this, I think you pretty much nailed them
@AnarchistAerospaceIndustries I'm having some issues with the game resetting XML edits I make just now, but Authros made a pretty good one a while back
I can give it a shot, but that'll require some pretty small lettering
@Droslash ah cool, well in that case you'll find your files in C:\Users[you]\AppData\LocalLow\Jundroo\SimplePlanes\AircraftDesigns. Anyway, on with a shortened
ROUND 2
Resizing, Moving, and Rotating Parts
I don't think much explanation will be needed for moving parts. Change the coordinates after "position" and it will move that way. Rotation work the same way, but it can be really difficult to work out which coordinate will do what. I'm afraid I don't have a good answer for this, you'll just need to experiment. Note that mirroring parts that have been rotated in the XML usually acts weirdly, and you'll have to fix the rotation of the mirrored ones a lot of the time.
Resizing fuselage blocks and wings is nice and easy too. Fuselage blocks have three parameters: frontScale, rearScale, and offset. The first two are the height and width at each end, the third covers the length, rise, and run. Wings have five parameters: rootLeadingOffset, rootTrailingOffset, tipLeadingOffset, tipTrailingOffset, and offset. The first four cover the width of the wing at each end, the last one covers the length, dihedral, and sweep of the wing.
Other Stuff
Connections: you can connect parts manually, regardless of their placement, near the end of the xml. I'm not sure how the connection points work, so I usually find that it's best to try to copy an existing similar relationship and change the part IDs that you need. This is useful when you have mirrored moved or rotated parts, because those usually don't retain their connections.
Colours: going to the bottom of the file and changing the r, m, and s values all to 1 will make your colour incredibly shiny, like this. It won't show up on mobile, but it's kinda fun.
I had more stuff written out but I can't remember what it was. Feel free to ask questions, and I hope this helps.
Jesus christ, apparently I just found out the hard way that comments have a characters limit. I'll come back and sort it once I get over how much text just got deleted.
@Droslash I see that you're on OSX, so I don't know where your files will be stored - maybe @NovaTopaz could help with that? - but I'll write up roughly how I go about it for when you find them. Everyone does stuff in different ways, of course, so experiment and see what works for you.
Getting Started
So the basic idea here is that you save your plane, open up the save for that plane in a text editor, change something, save it in the text editor, then reload it in SimplePlanes. You can keep SP open the whole time, just load the plane again to update to reflect the changes you made.
Identifying Parts in the XML
The first issue to solve is being able to actually find the parts you want to edit. Looking through the XML and just seeing a huge wall of numbered fuselages and wings isn't really helpful. Typically what I do is paint literally every part of the whole plane in one colour, preferably something easy to ignore like white or grey, using the first slot in the colour palette. Anything that I want to edit gets a unique colour, going through the palette in order from left to right. What this does is makes sure that the "Materials" parameter for all of the parts can be used to identify what you want to edit. Anything painted in the colour you want to ignore will have " materials="0" ", and the part using the next colour will be " materials = "1" ". This means you can do cmd+f with
or whatever other number you want to find, and it'll take you right there.
Engines
Lots of people like their planes to just be faster. This is also probably the easiest thing to do. With jets, you can literally just change the value for "max" to allow as much thrust as you want. Setting it to 2 will double your max thrust. Props have a couple more settings, and I've never really played with those much, but generally increasing max thrust, rpm, and power will make it go faster. Experiment and see what works! Note, however, that increasing max thrust does not speed up the time it takes for an engine to actually reach the thrust you want. Setting max thrust to 10 will make it take 10 times longer to reach max thrust. VTOL jets are popular because they adjust very quickly, so they don't suffer from this so much.
@NovaTopaz oh, that would be perfect for new folk! Regarding xml in Steam, have you had other issues with it? This is the first time I've had any trouble with it whatsoever, and it's such a weird thing to go wrong
@dsr1aviation he was the first person to see it, don't worry!