@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
@Droslash I don't think there is one big resource for that anywhere - maybe that's something that some of us should get together and make - but I can give you some starting points if you like. I'll get my laptop and type out a basic guide in just a bit
The files for your planes are most likely in Internal storage\Android\data\com.Jundroo.SimplePlanes\files\AircraftDesigns. They may be elsewhere if you store your files on an SD card. Anyway, find those, then open the one you want to edit in a text editor. Once you're done, save it, then reload the plane in SimplePlanes and your changes will take effect. I recommend backing up any planes you edit, it's easy to break them
I like the cockpit design, I haven't seen many people build one that way. If you use a similar one again, try to remove to normal cockpit that is upside down underneath the other ones, and get the remaining ones to sit flush with the fuselage.
You probably want to swap your pitch and roll control surfaces around. Pitch controls work best at the front and back of the plane, such as on the rear stabilisers, and roll controls work best out to the sides, such as on the ends of the wings.
Try to find some way of blending the intakes in to the fuselage a little. A fuselage section attached to the back of them and given enough of a run value to clip in to the main fuselage would work just fine.
You totally nailed the CoL and CoM positions, try to keep that similar.
Try to move the rear landing gear to be just a little bit behind the CoM. This will make taking off a lot easier.
@Jasperjl alright, upload it unlisted once the site is working again and give me a link, I'll take a look and see if I can work out what the problem is
You need to get the CoM in front of the CoL (centres of mass and lift, respectively, just in case you didn't already know). You can do this by adding and removing fuel or dead weight to make it heavier at the front. You can also try to add more wings at the back (replace structural panels wherever possible, clip them in to the fuselage, whatever else) and replace wings at the front with structural panels.
@Sirstupid I made another entry without the clipping abuse that disqualified my last entry, but I think it's actually even smaller. I'll upload it as soon as the issue with the site is sorted, but you can have a picture for now
@Spikerya @HakkeAirTech and also @General360 just in case you want to see. I present HakkeAirTech vs Spikerya! I'm also laying down a little challenge of my own for you: beat this
@Spikerya alright so I tried it out and it's too unstable to fly. It flips over basically as soon as it gets airborne. Am I doing something wrong? The CoM is pretty far behind the CoL, which doesn't usually work
Potentially, if you're on PC or Android. Your locations are saved in Settings.xml, so I guess if you put the text in a forum post, people could add it to their file
@MrVaultech probably because it was a pretty interesting design to work on. I was impressed you got it working at all, all of my previous asymmetrical efforts have been disastrous
@MrVaultech Okay so when I started doing this, nobody had fixed it yet, but it seems @HakkeAirTech has beaten me to it. We took pretty different approaches, though, so I'll post this anyway.
To Hakke: nice work, your version flies pretty well
@XVIindustries given how lightweight SP is, I reckon (from a totally non-technical standpoint) that more powerful mobile devices could manage fine. Maybe only have them destructible on high physics or something?
@abledbody I think that was an attempt at getting an accurate speed. Curiously, a new prop will explode when placed in that exact same spot, even though the old one doesn't. In the end, the main prop had to be modded a little
@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!
@Droslash I don't think there is one big resource for that anywhere - maybe that's something that some of us should get together and make - but I can give you some starting points if you like. I'll get my laptop and type out a basic guide in just a bit
@Zmaj I would have been glad to help out, but it seems that @RocketLL has beaten me to it
@bjac0 aww dude no, that was just a joke! I did comment again, but you might have missed it
The files for your planes are most likely in Internal storage\Android\data\com.Jundroo.SimplePlanes\files\AircraftDesigns. They may be elsewhere if you store your files on an SD card. Anyway, find those, then open the one you want to edit in a text editor. Once you're done, save it, then reload the plane in SimplePlanes and your changes will take effect. I recommend backing up any planes you edit, it's easy to break them
@bjac0 nah though I just posted that before you voted hahaha
@bjac0 I hate you.
@LiberatorWeaponAgency no worries, tag me when you upload it so I can see
@catmeowin @Sirstupid @grizzlitn @Noman0rumeral @DeezDucks @XVIindustries @AnarchistAerospaceIndustries thank you all
Alright, thoughts:
I like the cockpit design, I haven't seen many people build one that way. If you use a similar one again, try to remove to normal cockpit that is upside down underneath the other ones, and get the remaining ones to sit flush with the fuselage.
You probably want to swap your pitch and roll control surfaces around. Pitch controls work best at the front and back of the plane, such as on the rear stabilisers, and roll controls work best out to the sides, such as on the ends of the wings.
Try to find some way of blending the intakes in to the fuselage a little. A fuselage section attached to the back of them and given enough of a run value to clip in to the main fuselage would work just fine.
You totally nailed the CoL and CoM positions, try to keep that similar.
Try to move the rear landing gear to be just a little bit behind the CoM. This will make taking off a lot easier.
I'll take a look
@Spikerya maybe try downloading this version and testing it? It's possible you fixed it after uploading this
Nice job on this one. The pitch control surfaces are a bit big, but it still flies well and it looks good too
@Spikerya same issue, I'm afraid :/ I'll check out that Jaguar though, I always liked that plane
Feel free to check. Things have still been nudged about, but nothing is hidden
@General360 @Droslash cheers guys
@XVIIndustries @Cedy117
Are they attached to the part of the plane that has the cockpit, or are they just floating separately?
@Spikerya I'll try it on that and see what happens
@Sirstupid alright here it is, with what I believe is a score of 12.7
Move the vertical stabilisers back, they need to be far behind the CoM to work properly.
The propeller isn't doing any good, you'd be better taking it off.
I'm honestly not really sure why it rolls left slightly all the time, though.
@Jasperjl alright, upload it unlisted once the site is working again and give me a link, I'll take a look and see if I can work out what the problem is
You need to get the CoM in front of the CoL (centres of mass and lift, respectively, just in case you didn't already know). You can do this by adding and removing fuel or dead weight to make it heavier at the front. You can also try to add more wings at the back (replace structural panels wherever possible, clip them in to the fuselage, whatever else) and replace wings at the front with structural panels.
@Sirstupid I made another entry without the clipping abuse that disqualified my last entry, but I think it's actually even smaller. I'll upload it as soon as the issue with the site is sorted, but you can have a picture for now
@Spikerya @HakkeAirTech and also @General360 just in case you want to see. I present HakkeAirTech vs Spikerya! I'm also laying down a little challenge of my own for you: beat this
This is awesome, I'm gonna use it as my opponent in the WWII dogfight
@FredDeane will do
@Spikerya alright so I tried it out and it's too unstable to fly. It flips over basically as soon as it gets airborne. Am I doing something wrong? The CoM is pretty far behind the CoL, which doesn't usually work
@MrVaultech that plane was just total insanity. I have been looking for a new project though, my current ones have stalled a bit...
Potentially, if you're on PC or Android. Your locations are saved in Settings.xml, so I guess if you put the text in a forum post, people could add it to their file
Version 1.3, the one that adds weapons, is supposed to be released for mobile later this month
@Cedy117 @XVIindustries what sorta size are you guys looking for?
@MrVaultech probably because it was a pretty interesting design to work on. I was impressed you got it working at all, all of my previous asymmetrical efforts have been disastrous
Just saw your message on the video, I'll test this on PC tomorrow
@MrVaultech Okay so when I started doing this, nobody had fixed it yet, but it seems @HakkeAirTech has beaten me to it. We took pretty different approaches, though, so I'll post this anyway.
To Hakke: nice work, your version flies pretty well
If it's my own design, I usually draw it, but only very roughly. I don't want to get bogged down in details that will probably have to be changed.
@Spikerya I actually didn't! That's really interesting, it seems that I have some reading to do
@HakkeAirTech oh, sorry, I didn't realise you wanted yours done! I'll put it up against the winner tomorrow
@XVIindustries given how lightweight SP is, I reckon (from a totally non-technical standpoint) that more powerful mobile devices could manage fine. Maybe only have them destructible on high physics or something?
@abledbody I think that was an attempt at getting an accurate speed. Curiously, a new prop will explode when placed in that exact same spot, even though the old one doesn't. In the end, the main prop had to be modded a little
@FullFruntall @XVIindustries well that's because Harriers are wonderful