Sadly, the idiots greatly outnumber the non-idiots in this world, so they get to define what's popular and what's not. Take comfort in the fact that you'll have the last laugh, when you're a well-paid professional with an interesting job and a promising career, and the formerly self-appointed "cool kids" find out that school was the peak of their lives, and it's all downhill from there.
Life is a long race -- those who have it hard in the beginning become all the stronger for it, and that begins to matter more and more as you get out of the sheltered idiot-friendly bubble that is school, and move into the real world. Those who peak while in the asylum, on the other hand, find that the things that used to matter there don't transfer to the real world.
@ThePilotDude You really think I haven't? They just don't work well, and would be spots of imperfection on my (to me) perfect builds. Consider: there's no way to make actual wheel wells inside a tube of fuselage blocks, or landing gear doors that sit flush with complex curved surfaces. So you have landing gears and doors materialising out of solid blocks. Then there are the problems with rotators and suspensions and wheels, and the fact that every rotator, piston, shock absorber, or detacher creates another "Body" in your build, which means more physics calculations and lag for large/complex builds. This is the reason I try to avoid moving parts entirely on my builds and use things like airbrakes and control surfaces to simulate door panels.
Lastly, one landing gear is pretty much the same as another, as are control surfaces, and I get no joy out of building them. I play this game for fun, not as a chore. Doing the same things over and over again seems like a chore to me.
It gets a little old when people constantly assume I'm doing things (or not doing them) out of ignorance or laziness or whatever, when they're carefully considered choices.
@Jetliner101 There are lots of advantages to big builds. They look smoother, and are better for recording videos, better for dogfighting with, easier to work with, can shoot large bombs and bullets more plausibly, and size is part of the reason I can build so rapidly.
@GritAerospaceSolutionsLTD It doesn't matter if they go on welfare, work crappy jobs, or win the lottery -- being stupid is punishment enough in itself. No matter what, dumb people will make bad life choices over and over again, and their lives will be miserable overall.
And if the welfare state gets too big and taxes get too punishing, the smart people can always leave for another country where the leeches aren't allowed to suck quite so much blood. Meanwhile, the leeches can live on bleach and Tide pods... for a while.
@AndrewGarrison More ideas (not trying to overwhelm you guys with huge expectations, just putting ideas out there -- if any of these make it into the update I'll be happy):
To improve performance, why not just remove all the shrubs/bushes from the terrain? I don't think anyone cares about those. Or the windmills.
For the generic gun/cannon part, include a variety of sounds/muzzle flash effects/tracer effects/impact effects and let players choose any combination of these. This would let players make any kind of weapon they want, ranging from realistic guns/cannons to sci-fi weapons.
Similarly, for engines, a generic jet engine part with a variety of nozzle types and exhaust plume effects.
More targets (ships/land bases).
More landing gear types, with a bit more detail and complex animations.
Some of these are not the developers' fault, they're an inherent limitation of the Unity engine, especially the bug with the rotators and angular momentum.
Also keep in mind that this is an indie game, with very few resources. If it was by a big-name studio, it would be much more expensive to make, meaning it would have to appeal to a much wider audience to make a profit. Think "Press F to enable flight capability."
The undo functionality could be improved, and the mirroring/login bugs could be fixed, I agree with that.
Even the graphics could be easily improved -- a lot -- with very simple, low-performance-cost shaders. Many reviewers have pointed out how the graphics look dull and muddy overall. I'd be happy to donate my shaders to the cause. @AndrewGarrison
I dislike your aircraft and your negative egotistical aura. Block me so that I may never be subject to these eyesores again.
What's actually egotistical is you pompously announcing your unsolicited opinion as if it's supposed to mean something to me. Also, me blocking you would do nothing to keep you from "being subject to these eyesores." Do try to think before you speak, mmmkay?
Also, I'm tempted to let your charade continue just for the sheer amusement of seeing what other simpleminded stratagems your tiny mind can come up with, but I'm going to be kind and let you know that I see right through your game. I know who you are, and that you're hijacking old, inactive accounts to post these messages. I wonder how Andrew would react if I brought this to his attention?
Imagine having an imagination, so you don't have to slavishly copy everything exactly down to the last rivet.
Imagine having more than a little knowledge, so you'd notice all the other things I've changed.
Imagine having the good sense not to expose your meager knowledge by complaining about the one thing you noticed.
Imagine having the good sense not to criticize someone whose skills are far beyond your own.
Imagine having the courage to make your own changes to the design, just because you want to.
Imagine not being so petty that you can only say something negative about a build this high in quality.
Imagine your highest ambition not being to emulate a copy machine.
Imagine wanting to express your creativity in everything you do.
Imagine not being so completely socially inept that your first communication with a stranger is not a "Hello," or even a "Nice build, but...", but a straight-up criticism that isn't even well thought-out.
Imagine not being the kind of person whose life is so narrow in scope that the only way they can feel better about themselves is by demonstrating how they know a little bit more than the next person - even when they actually don't.
Some simple suggestions for 1.8 that should be easy to implement:
The option to set a material's ambient property, so we can create glowing parts out of fuselage blocks (or anything), as on SimpleRockets2.
The ability to change the material on a part with an input; this would enable us to make complex shapes that could light up when triggered (using the aforementioned glowing material).
Full XML editing capabilities in the base game so iOS users don't feel frustrated. This doesn't need a fancy UI; it just needs to loop over the part's available attributes and create a list of labeled text fields with minimal/no validation.
Replace the current palette-based material editor with one that lets us input RGB, S, M, and A (ambient) values directly or with sliders.
To add to the current cornerTypes options, could we have a "bevel" corner type?
Better-looking tracers, as in War Thunder (glowing elongated orbs with halos instead of flat, sharp-edged sprites)
A special brush that allows selecting a bunch of parts by painting them with a special "selector" material (make it glow red, or pulse, or something). Parts painted with it can be edited as a group (e.g. cornerTypes, massScale, dragScale, etc.).
You could just copy and paste the story of how, on the morning Yeager made his historic flight, he had two broken ribs from a horseriding accident the day before. Now, to close the cockpit door on the X-1, you had to pull really hard with the right hand, and with his broken ribs Yeager couldn't do that. The cockpit was too cramped to be able to get enough leverage to close the door with the left hand.
Yeager didn't want to lose his shot at being the first supersonic man, so he didn't tell anyone except the flight engineer, who sawed off a broom handle that Yeager could use to close the door with his left hand. And that is how the world's first supersonic flight was made, with a sawed-off broom handle in the cockpit.
While this is great, I have another suggestion: related posts. When someone clicks on a post, there should be a sidebar with other builds (perhaps randomly chosen, perhaps ranked by upvotes, or some combination of factors) of the user who created the post. This way a user's older builds will have a chance to be seen again, instead of being lost in time.
But even more important than that, I'd rather see feature updates to SimplePlanes itself than the website. The one feature I'd like to see the most is multi-part selection and manipulation. Pretty much like Fine Tuner, except with the improvement that parts should be selectable by clicking and dragging, just like applying paint. Selecting a few dozen parts by clicking over and over again gets old really quickly.
Also, if you could integrate Overload's functionality into the Designer, that would be fantastic. My heart bleeds for iOS users whose only option for using modded parts is to ask other people to mod them.
For a builder of ur status and ur bio I was expecting a fully-functional bomber with a ton of details and cool stuff on it. On the contrary, all I get is badly shaped roundels, broken ldg, no turrets, no camo, no panelling, nothing.
What you expect is your business and your problem. I build to my standards, which I consider far higher than yours.
What people like you fail to understand is that there is no one universal standard that everyone must build to. My builds don't meet your expectations? Your builds don't meet mine either. The difference is I'm not arrogant enough to assume the right to tell anyone else what to build or how to build it.
If I held everyone's builds to my standards, I'd be upvoting maybe ten builds a year. But unlike you, I'm not narrow-minded and self-righteous, so I can appreciate that other people have different goals when building.
To me, this build (like all others of mine) looks beautiful, flies well, does its job well, and is unblemished by unsightly decals that don't follow the contours of the airframe. I looked at your latest build and it looks downright ugly to me. But I wouldn't dream of commenting on your build to tell you that, unless you asked me for a critique.
Moral lesson: Being humble, self-conscious and open to constructive criticism helps a lot with many life's aspects of a responsible adult.
First, it's you and people like you who think that their standards are somehow universal and presume the right to impose them on everyone that are the arrogant ones. And (ohh, this is good) allow me to point out the delicious irony and immense hypocrisy of accusing me of arrogance when you belong to a group that calls itself "SimplePlanes Masters Chat."
Second, first figure out what "constructive criticism" actually means, before you presume to offer some.
Third, I can promise you I'm infinitely more self-aware (note: self-conscious means something else entirely) than you. For instance, you're the one acting arrogantly by assuming that your standards are the "right" ones.
Finally, you're in no position to be giving me moral lessons (or any other lessons for that matter). Before you offer anyone advice, make sure you're actually in a position to do so.
Note: If you want to be taken seriously as an adult, refrain from using "words" like "u," "r," "ur," and "urself." Separating paragraphs and using correct grammar also helps.
@AndrewGarrison That's... disturbing. I'd never had a single interaction with him before -- in over 2 years of being a regular poster -- and the first comment he ever made on one of my posts was deeply sarcastic. Someone whose first interaction with another person is a rude expression of pent-up resentment (or whatever) does not have the maturity or character to be a moderator.
Thanks, @Texasfam04. Hey, I've used colors before, you know. Once. Maybe even twice... and you know what they say, a butterfly without missiles is like a rhinoceros without wheels. Or something.
Other improvements that could be implemented without too much trouble (well, probably):
The ability to designate parts as the ones you want attached. For instance, when adding a subassembly to a build, players should be able to say that they want this part on the subassembly to attach to that part on the build, and no other parts should get involved, thank you.
The ability to edit multiple parts as a group, as in Fine Tuner, except that parts should be selectable by clicking-and-dragging, like applying paint, rather than clicking, clicking, clicking....
The ability to "pick" certain properties from one part and "drop" them on to other parts using a property brush.
The ability to mega-nudge a part a good way away from the build to attach other parts to it, then un-mega-nudge it back, along with all the new parts connected to it.
Keyboard shortcuts to increase/decrease time of day in steps of 1 hour.
The ability to draw a bounding box around the build, to simplify physics calculations. For instance, if an airplane has 600 parts, its overall shape could be contained within one cylinder to contain the fuselage, and one flat box for each wing surface, enabling the physics calculations to be done with just 6 parts. This would improve the performance of high-part-count builds a great deal, and enable mobile users to download more complex builds.
I wish people didn't start discussions like this one, the only thing they can result in is conflict and bitterness. If I cared about points, I could add paint schemes and decals and easily get twice the upvotes I normally do. See my post Dagger for an example. If I had done that on all my posts, my point total would have been much higher. So again: I'm not here to compete with anyone, especially not on points. I build to please myself, and upload so that others who like my builds can enjoy them. Being top dog on a game website is not among my ambitions.
@Treadmill103 Thanks :) I do love dropping a bomb from miles away and being able to see it all the way to the target. Now if only there were more targets...
Did I ask you for advice? Let me assure you, I'm more aware than anyone else of how I come across and what the consequences are. So I don't need your help to understand that, or anything else. I'm acting the way I want to act, with full knowledge of the consequences.
Don't criticize other people for being arrogant if you yourself fall under that.
I've never criticized anyone for being arrogant, I'm not that much of a loser. I'm just pointing out the hypocrisy of accusing me of arrogance when he himself is content to be part of a group that labels itself "masters" of SP.
However, you seem to be unable to handle criticism or even questions about a build.
And the sky is green, and the sun rises in the west. I've replied to every criticism I've ever had with logical, well-reasoned, well-articulated responses. If you interpret that as "antagonizing people" and being "unable to handle criticism," I can only say you're so wrong that you're not even wrong.
Treat others how you want to be treated.
I do that consistently -- I only say nice things when commenting on other people's builds, I don't offer unsolicited advice or criticism, or hold other people to my standards. But certain people seem entirely incapable of returning the courtesy.
If you respond to basic criticism the way you do, no one will like you.
Why are you assuming my desire is to be liked by people who think like you? If people like you started liking me, I'd be questioning what I was doing wrong. No, I explicitly only want the approval of people who think like me.
Finally, for hopefully the last time, I really do not want to hear from you, your friends, or anyone else who thinks like you. Can... you... leave... me... alone?
@Zanedavid See, the thing about abstract art is that how people interpret it is entirely up to them. Just off the top of my head, this could be interpreted as:
something to do with climate change
the circle of life
a really fancy hubcap for a really wide tyre
something about the hamster-wheel nature of most lives
And so on. But I can assure you it's none of those things, or at least, I had nothing like them in mind when building this.
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".
@SledDriver thy dont soun very rudely or negative.. i just exactly used the "why dont you paint your builds and why your builds are so smooth" in different way to make them think that it was actually not staged and serious..
"Why SledDrivers Builds are so blank and why it is so blacc refers to why dont you pain your builds and the kiddie slide shape refers to the smoothness of your builds the "slide" was th one that refers the sentence into the smoothness of your build since a good quality slides is smooth..
Really? So when you say "why are they shaped like a kiddie's slide" you're actually asking me why my builds are of such high quality? In a forum post titled "Criticism of SledDriver's Builds"? Not in the habit of thinking before you say something, are you?
You asked the exact questions I specifically told you not to ask. If you were being honest, you'd have commented on one of my builds, not in the forum -- with your buddies immediately posting deliberately incendiary comments like "lack of originality since his first build." You really thought I'd fall for that, SnarkFannyPoo?
Since you and your friends are clearly incapable of figuring this out on your own, here's a helpful idea that will probably blow your tiny minds: before you set out to try to manipulate someone, make sure they're dumber than you are.
Very cool, but the magnets don't contribute anything to the projectile's acceleration, it's all the detacher. I deleted all the magnets and it still works the same. Other than that, an outstanding creation. I especially like the way the projectile spins.
@AndrewGarrison Thanks for the update -- I really like the UI fixes, especially the new keyboard shortcuts, and the ability to set precise values for nudging and rotation.
Bug report: when nudging using the keyboard, the game doesn't respect the "Connected parts" setting (only the selected part moves). Nudging using the little arrow buttons works as expected. Platform: Windows 7 Pro, 64-bit.
Rotational and translational "mover" parts that don't wobble, or trigger drag/angular momentum recalculations in general. The existing airbrake part is a good example of what I mean, except nothing can be attached to it, so it's not very useful. Imagine a "translator" part that could be configured like this: From input range 0 to 0.25, move 0.5 unit along the x-axis; from input range 0.4 to 1, move 2 units along the z-axis. This could be used to make a door that first pops out of the fuselage, then slides along it. These parts don't need a fancy base mesh like the current rotators and pistons, they could be just a rectangular/cylindrical block with two attach points.
A "cannon" part that's basically a detacher, with the difference that it doesn't create additional Bodies and therefore doesn't affect physics; It takes a subassembly as its "shell" and a number attribute as its ammo count. When fired, it spawns the subassembly in real time, and launches it with the desired force. Firing it shouldn't affect the build's physics in any way, except for an optional recoil attribute. The cannon part could be a simple cylinder, without any fancy base mesh -- we can create our own cannon models to attach to it. It would have two attach points, one at the rear and one at the front. As an added bonus (this would be fantastic to have), it could compress longitudinally when fired to simulate recoil, with the rear attach point remaining stationary and the front attach point moving in a gun-recoil motion. So we could create the main gun body out of fuselage blocks and attach it to the rear point, and the barrel out of more fuselage blocks and attach it to the front point. Because this cannon part would fire a subassembly instead of a predefined shell, it could be used to make not just cannons, but ejector seats, missile silos, etc. The cannon would have attributes like speed, impactType (kinetic, explosive, incendiary...), damage, explosionScale, muzzleFlashType, etc.
Meanwhile, I hope all you developers have a great Christmas/NY break, and thanks for building the game that's given me more enjoyment than any other I've ever played.
@Texasfam04 Exactly! I'd build the "intended" model once, but then I'd build whatever I could come up with, and that was way more fun, and that's what gave Lego its lasting value for me. I actually find it worrying that a community of mostly teenagers -- for a building game -- is so chock-full of kids who just can't think beyond replicas. It's almost like a cult -- not only do they build nothing but replicas themselves, they pester and sometimes actually try to bully everyone else into doing the same.* It's a good example of "invented here" syndrome -- if "someone else" designed something, like a Star Wars spaceship, making a replica of that is fine; but heaven forbid that one of us dares to come up with something original.
* Note: I'm not referring to anyone who's posted in this thread, but to past encounters I've had.
@Spectre2520 You'll have to ask the developers, as that just doesn't happen for me, on this build or any other, on any physics settings. Unless, as I suspect, this alleged "auto-roll" is a prank.
@ViciousTNT Yeah, and the SR-71 didn't even have to try. It was in another class altogether. Over Mach 2.8, the Foxbat's engines would disintegrate in a matter of minutes, while the SR-71's J-58s could keep it up for hours and hours. In the words of the most famous MiG-25 pilot of all time:
"Chasing the SR-71 along the Siberian Coast, I could not match its speed. One flight in the MiG-25 and we had to change our engines. I could not believe that such technologies existed."
The pilot was Viktor Belenko, who defected to the US (via Japan) in a MiG-25. The SR-71 was part of the reason for his defection, because he began to question how, if the Americans were as decadent and stupid as the Soviet government would have him believe, they could produce technology so much better than the Soviets. That's the Blackbird for you: destroying Communism from within, simply by existing. One hell of a plane, and it has never been equaled.
@Chancey21 Plasma cannons are not that unrealistic. Railguns already exist. Not yet airplane-mountable, but the tech is still in its infancy.
Anyway, regardless of how realistic my weapons are, I have my own idea of how I want my planes to handle, and that's what I've implemented. It's easy enough to make a super-maneuverable airplane in SP.
@CRJ900Pilot Yeah, it's funny how so many people go out of their way to make themselves miserable.
And as for code, well, programming is just a way of giving inanimate things a kind of intelligence. First, you solve the problem in your head, then you teach a machine to solve it, leaving you free for newer and more interesting problems. So it's not just smooth shapes -- I could write a function that takes parameters like mass, length, thrust, roll rate, and wing loading, and generates the XML for a flight module with those parameters.
The ability to program computers is the closest thing to a superpower we can realistically possess....
@AndrewGarrison You don't have a problem with moderators talking to customers like they're cattle? "Carry on being arrogant and you'll be banned." If that's an actual rule, please update the site rules.
I think it's a mistake to have False equivalent to -1 instead of 0. Let's say I want an expression to evaluate to True when AG1 is on and there is a Pitch input. The conventional, expected way of doing this would be:
Activate1 & Pitch
However, this will only return true when pitching down, because pitching up is negative and therefore False. I realise that I can get around this by using abs:
Activate1 & abs(Pitch)
But this means that the correct way is more roundabout and contrary to expectations.
Other parts in SP work according to the zero false, non-zero true principle. Control surfaces and rotators rotate one way or another depending on the sign of the input; pistons move one way or another depending on the sign of the input; beacon lights are on when the input is non-zero and off when zero. To implement FT such that 1 is true and -1 is false goes contrary to SP's own logic.
If backward compatibility is a concern, the number of builds using FT in a way that they would break from this is miniscule. The choice, then, is between letting a handful of builds force every future build to use twisted and inconsistent logic, versus correctness and simplicity going forward. The implications will be far-reaching.
@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.
Sadly, the idiots greatly outnumber the non-idiots in this world, so they get to define what's popular and what's not. Take comfort in the fact that you'll have the last laugh, when you're a well-paid professional with an interesting job and a promising career, and the formerly self-appointed "cool kids" find out that school was the peak of their lives, and it's all downhill from there.
Life is a long race -- those who have it hard in the beginning become all the stronger for it, and that begins to matter more and more as you get out of the sheltered idiot-friendly bubble that is school, and move into the real world. Those who peak while in the asylum, on the other hand, find that the things that used to matter there don't transfer to the real world.
+49@ThePilotDude You really think I haven't? They just don't work well, and would be spots of imperfection on my (to me) perfect builds. Consider: there's no way to make actual wheel wells inside a tube of fuselage blocks, or landing gear doors that sit flush with complex curved surfaces. So you have landing gears and doors materialising out of solid blocks. Then there are the problems with rotators and suspensions and wheels, and the fact that every rotator, piston, shock absorber, or detacher creates another "Body" in your build, which means more physics calculations and lag for large/complex builds. This is the reason I try to avoid moving parts entirely on my builds and use things like airbrakes and control surfaces to simulate door panels.
Lastly, one landing gear is pretty much the same as another, as are control surfaces, and I get no joy out of building them. I play this game for fun, not as a chore. Doing the same things over and over again seems like a chore to me.
It gets a little old when people constantly assume I'm doing things (or not doing them) out of ignorance or laziness or whatever, when they're carefully considered choices.
+39@Jetliner101 There are lots of advantages to big builds. They look smoother, and are better for recording videos, better for dogfighting with, easier to work with, can shoot large bombs and bullets more plausibly, and size is part of the reason I can build so rapidly.
+36@GritAerospaceSolutionsLTD It doesn't matter if they go on welfare, work crappy jobs, or win the lottery -- being stupid is punishment enough in itself. No matter what, dumb people will make bad life choices over and over again, and their lives will be miserable overall.
And if the welfare state gets too big and taxes get too punishing, the smart people can always leave for another country where the leeches aren't allowed to suck quite so much blood. Meanwhile, the leeches can live on bleach and Tide pods... for a while.
+18@AndrewGarrison More ideas (not trying to overwhelm you guys with huge expectations, just putting ideas out there -- if any of these make it into the update I'll be happy):
- To improve performance, why not just remove all the shrubs/bushes from the terrain? I don't think anyone cares about those. Or the windmills.
- For the generic gun/cannon part, include a variety of sounds/muzzle flash effects/tracer effects/impact effects and let players choose any combination of these. This would let players make any kind of weapon they want, ranging from realistic guns/cannons to sci-fi weapons.
- Similarly, for engines, a generic jet engine part with a variety of nozzle types and exhaust plume effects.
- More targets (ships/land bases).
- More landing gear types, with a bit more detail and complex animations.
- A range of low- to high-poly cockpit models.
+13@CSP27 Yeah, I posted it earlier:
+11@SodiumChloride SledDriver Industries has a special waiver from the Department of Physics.
+9Your skill is outstanding. Great work.
+9@GrizzlitnCFSP Glad to hear that. I've just moved on to other things.
+7Some of these are not the developers' fault, they're an inherent limitation of the Unity engine, especially the bug with the rotators and angular momentum.
Also keep in mind that this is an indie game, with very few resources. If it was by a big-name studio, it would be much more expensive to make, meaning it would have to appeal to a much wider audience to make a profit. Think "Press F to enable flight capability."
The undo functionality could be improved, and the mirroring/login bugs could be fixed, I agree with that.
Even the graphics could be easily improved -- a lot -- with very simple, low-performance-cost shaders. Many reviewers have pointed out how the graphics look dull and muddy overall. I'd be happy to donate my shaders to the cause. @AndrewGarrison
+7@FlowerDealer
What's actually egotistical is you pompously announcing your unsolicited opinion as if it's supposed to mean something to me. Also, me blocking you would do nothing to keep you from "being subject to these eyesores." Do try to think before you speak, mmmkay?
Also, I'm tempted to let your charade continue just for the sheer amusement of seeing what other simpleminded stratagems your tiny mind can come up with, but I'm going to be kind and let you know that I see right through your game. I know who you are, and that you're hijacking old, inactive accounts to post these messages. I wonder how Andrew would react if I brought this to his attention?
+6@WolfSpark
Imagine having an imagination, so you don't have to slavishly copy everything exactly down to the last rivet.
Imagine having more than a little knowledge, so you'd notice all the other things I've changed.
Imagine having the good sense not to expose your meager knowledge by complaining about the one thing you noticed.
Imagine having the good sense not to criticize someone whose skills are far beyond your own.
Imagine having the courage to make your own changes to the design, just because you want to.
Imagine not being so petty that you can only say something negative about a build this high in quality.
Imagine your highest ambition not being to emulate a copy machine.
Imagine wanting to express your creativity in everything you do.
Imagine not being so completely socially inept that your first communication with a stranger is not a "Hello," or even a "Nice build, but...", but a straight-up criticism that isn't even well thought-out.
Imagine not being the kind of person whose life is so narrow in scope that the only way they can feel better about themselves is by demonstrating how they know a little bit more than the next person - even when they actually don't.
Imagine being human.
Imagine being a decent human being.
+6@EternalDarkness If you don't want to upvote it, I'd rather you not comment either. And I'd appreciate it if you'd refer to me as SledDriver.
+6Some simple suggestions for 1.8 that should be easy to implement:
@AndrewGarrison
+6You could just copy and paste the story of how, on the morning Yeager made his historic flight, he had two broken ribs from a horseriding accident the day before. Now, to close the cockpit door on the X-1, you had to pull really hard with the right hand, and with his broken ribs Yeager couldn't do that. The cockpit was too cramped to be able to get enough leverage to close the door with the left hand.
Yeager didn't want to lose his shot at being the first supersonic man, so he didn't tell anyone except the flight engineer, who sawed off a broom handle that Yeager could use to close the door with his left hand. And that is how the world's first supersonic flight was made, with a sawed-off broom handle in the cockpit.
+6While this is great, I have another suggestion: related posts. When someone clicks on a post, there should be a sidebar with other builds (perhaps randomly chosen, perhaps ranked by upvotes, or some combination of factors) of the user who created the post. This way a user's older builds will have a chance to be seen again, instead of being lost in time.
But even more important than that, I'd rather see feature updates to SimplePlanes itself than the website. The one feature I'd like to see the most is multi-part selection and manipulation. Pretty much like Fine Tuner, except with the improvement that parts should be selectable by clicking and dragging, just like applying paint. Selecting a few dozen parts by clicking over and over again gets old really quickly.
Also, if you could integrate Overload's functionality into the Designer, that would be fantastic. My heart bleeds for iOS users whose only option for using modded parts is to ask other people to mod them.
+6@GrizzlitnCFSP Yes, mon ami, I am well, how are you?
+5@Dimkal
What you expect is your business and your problem. I build to my standards, which I consider far higher than yours.
What people like you fail to understand is that there is no one universal standard that everyone must build to. My builds don't meet your expectations? Your builds don't meet mine either. The difference is I'm not arrogant enough to assume the right to tell anyone else what to build or how to build it.
If I held everyone's builds to my standards, I'd be upvoting maybe ten builds a year. But unlike you, I'm not narrow-minded and self-righteous, so I can appreciate that other people have different goals when building.
To me, this build (like all others of mine) looks beautiful, flies well, does its job well, and is unblemished by unsightly decals that don't follow the contours of the airframe. I looked at your latest build and it looks downright ugly to me. But I wouldn't dream of commenting on your build to tell you that, unless you asked me for a critique.
First, it's you and people like you who think that their standards are somehow universal and presume the right to impose them on everyone that are the arrogant ones. And (ohh, this is good) allow me to point out the delicious irony and immense hypocrisy of accusing me of arrogance when you belong to a group that calls itself "SimplePlanes Masters Chat."
Second, first figure out what "constructive criticism" actually means, before you presume to offer some.
Third, I can promise you I'm infinitely more self-aware (note: self-conscious means something else entirely) than you. For instance, you're the one acting arrogantly by assuming that your standards are the "right" ones.
Finally, you're in no position to be giving me moral lessons (or any other lessons for that matter). Before you offer anyone advice, make sure you're actually in a position to do so.
Note: If you want to be taken seriously as an adult, refrain from using "words" like "u," "r," "ur," and "urself." Separating paragraphs and using correct grammar also helps.
Have a nice life :)
+5Never thought I'd see a tesseract on SimplePlanes.
+5Negative, Ghost Rider, the pattern is full.
+5@EternalDarkness People really shouldn't speak on issues on which they don't have all the facts. This is what @RailfanEthan said:
This is what I said:
Anyone who thinks either of us was "cursing" the other should lock themselves in a room and never venture out into the big, bad world.
+5@AndrewGarrison That's... disturbing. I'd never had a single interaction with him before -- in over 2 years of being a regular poster -- and the first comment he ever made on one of my posts was deeply sarcastic. Someone whose first interaction with another person is a rude expression of pent-up resentment (or whatever) does not have the maturity or character to be a moderator.
+5Thanks, @Texasfam04. Hey, I've used colors before, you know. Once. Maybe even twice... and you know what they say, a butterfly without missiles is like a rhinoceros without wheels. Or something.
+5Other improvements that could be implemented without too much trouble (well, probably):
- The ability to designate parts as the ones you want attached. For instance, when adding a subassembly to a build, players should be able to say that they want this part on the subassembly to attach to that part on the build, and no other parts should get involved, thank you.
- The ability to edit multiple parts as a group, as in Fine Tuner, except that parts should be selectable by clicking-and-dragging, like applying paint, rather than clicking, clicking, clicking....
- The ability to "pick" certain properties from one part and "drop" them on to other parts using a property brush.
- The ability to mega-nudge a part a good way away from the build to attach other parts to it, then un-mega-nudge it back, along with all the new parts connected to it.
- Keyboard shortcuts to increase/decrease time of day in steps of 1 hour.
- The ability to draw a bounding box around the build, to simplify physics calculations. For instance, if an airplane has 600 parts, its overall shape could be contained within one cylinder to contain the fuselage, and one flat box for each wing surface, enabling the physics calculations to be done with just 6 parts. This would improve the performance of high-part-count builds a great deal, and enable mobile users to download more complex builds.
+5I wish people didn't start discussions like this one, the only thing they can result in is conflict and bitterness. If I cared about points, I could add paint schemes and decals and easily get twice the upvotes I normally do. See my post Dagger for an example. If I had done that on all my posts, my point total would have been much higher. So again: I'm not here to compete with anyone, especially not on points. I build to please myself, and upload so that others who like my builds can enjoy them. Being top dog on a game website is not among my ambitions.
+5@Treadmill103 Thanks :) I do love dropping a bomb from miles away and being able to see it all the way to the target. Now if only there were more targets...
+4@SupremeDorian
Did I ask you for advice? Let me assure you, I'm more aware than anyone else of how I come across and what the consequences are. So I don't need your help to understand that, or anything else. I'm acting the way I want to act, with full knowledge of the consequences.
I've never criticized anyone for being arrogant, I'm not that much of a loser. I'm just pointing out the hypocrisy of accusing me of arrogance when he himself is content to be part of a group that labels itself "masters" of SP.
And the sky is green, and the sun rises in the west. I've replied to every criticism I've ever had with logical, well-reasoned, well-articulated responses. If you interpret that as "antagonizing people" and being "unable to handle criticism," I can only say you're so wrong that you're not even wrong.
I do that consistently -- I only say nice things when commenting on other people's builds, I don't offer unsolicited advice or criticism, or hold other people to my standards. But certain people seem entirely incapable of returning the courtesy.
Why are you assuming my desire is to be liked by people who think like you? If people like you started liking me, I'd be questioning what I was doing wrong. No, I explicitly only want the approval of people who think like me.
Finally, for hopefully the last time, I really do not want to hear from you, your friends, or anyone else who thinks like you. Can... you... leave... me... alone?
+4@NightmareCorporation That's an odd notion. Do you also believe that exercise causes muscle loss? Or that productive work causes poverty?
+4@Zanedavid See, the thing about abstract art is that how people interpret it is entirely up to them. Just off the top of my head, this could be interpreted as:
And so on. But I can assure you it's none of those things, or at least, I had nothing like them in mind when building this.
+4@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@0n33
Really? So when you say "why are they shaped like a kiddie's slide" you're actually asking me why my builds are of such high quality? In a forum post titled "Criticism of SledDriver's Builds"? Not in the habit of thinking before you say something, are you?
You asked the exact questions I specifically told you not to ask. If you were being honest, you'd have commented on one of my builds, not in the forum -- with your buddies immediately posting deliberately incendiary comments like "lack of originality since his first build." You really thought I'd fall for that, SnarkFannyPoo?
Since you and your friends are clearly incapable of figuring this out on your own, here's a helpful idea that will probably blow your tiny minds: before you set out to try to manipulate someone, make sure they're dumber than you are.
+4@Chancey21 For a moment I thought you were counting in binary, there.
+4Very cool, but the magnets don't contribute anything to the projectile's acceleration, it's all the detacher. I deleted all the magnets and it still works the same. Other than that, an outstanding creation. I especially like the way the projectile spins.
+4@Treadmill103 Now that's navigation as it used to be: "go south by south-west, then turn west on Tuesday."
+4@AndrewGarrison Thanks for the update -- I really like the UI fixes, especially the new keyboard shortcuts, and the ability to set precise values for nudging and rotation.
Bug report: when nudging using the keyboard, the game doesn't respect the "Connected parts" setting (only the selected part moves). Nudging using the little arrow buttons works as expected. Platform: Windows 7 Pro, 64-bit.
+4Somewhat less simple suggestions:
Meanwhile, I hope all you developers have a great Christmas/NY break, and thanks for building the game that's given me more enjoyment than any other I've ever played.
@AndrewGarrison
+4@Texasfam04 Exactly! I'd build the "intended" model once, but then I'd build whatever I could come up with, and that was way more fun, and that's what gave Lego its lasting value for me. I actually find it worrying that a community of mostly teenagers -- for a building game -- is so chock-full of kids who just can't think beyond replicas. It's almost like a cult -- not only do they build nothing but replicas themselves, they pester and sometimes actually try to bully everyone else into doing the same.* It's a good example of "invented here" syndrome -- if "someone else" designed something, like a Star Wars spaceship, making a replica of that is fine; but heaven forbid that one of us dares to come up with something original.
* Note: I'm not referring to anyone who's posted in this thread, but to past encounters I've had.
+4@Spectre2520 You'll have to ask the developers, as that just doesn't happen for me, on this build or any other, on any physics settings. Unless, as I suspect, this alleged "auto-roll" is a prank.
+4@diegoavion84 Yes... a speed demon.
+4@ThomasRoderick Thanks. Can't go wrong with black, black, black, and red.
+4@ViciousTNT Yeah, and the SR-71 didn't even have to try. It was in another class altogether. Over Mach 2.8, the Foxbat's engines would disintegrate in a matter of minutes, while the SR-71's J-58s could keep it up for hours and hours. In the words of the most famous MiG-25 pilot of all time:
The pilot was Viktor Belenko, who defected to the US (via Japan) in a MiG-25. The SR-71 was part of the reason for his defection, because he began to question how, if the Americans were as decadent and stupid as the Soviet government would have him believe, they could produce technology so much better than the Soviets. That's the Blackbird for you: destroying Communism from within, simply by existing. One hell of a plane, and it has never been equaled.
+4@Chancey21 Plasma cannons are not that unrealistic. Railguns already exist. Not yet airplane-mountable, but the tech is still in its infancy.
Anyway, regardless of how realistic my weapons are, I have my own idea of how I want my planes to handle, and that's what I've implemented. It's easy enough to make a super-maneuverable airplane in SP.
+4Nice, but needs an "AG1 to bang shoe on table..."
+4@Veronica Congratulations.
+3@CRJ900Pilot Yeah, it's funny how so many people go out of their way to make themselves miserable.
And as for code, well, programming is just a way of giving inanimate things a kind of intelligence. First, you solve the problem in your head, then you teach a machine to solve it, leaving you free for newer and more interesting problems. So it's not just smooth shapes -- I could write a function that takes parameters like mass, length, thrust, roll rate, and wing loading, and generates the XML for a flight module with those parameters.
The ability to program computers is the closest thing to a superpower we can realistically possess....
+3@AndrewGarrison You don't have a problem with moderators talking to customers like they're cattle? "Carry on being arrogant and you'll be banned." If that's an actual rule, please update the site rules.
+3I think it's a mistake to have False equivalent to -1 instead of 0. Let's say I want an expression to evaluate to True when AG1 is on and there is a Pitch input. The conventional, expected way of doing this would be:
Activate1 & PitchHowever, this will only return true when pitching down, because pitching up is negative and therefore False. I realise that I can get around this by using abs:
Activate1 & abs(Pitch)But this means that the correct way is more roundabout and contrary to expectations.
Other parts in SP work according to the zero false, non-zero true principle. Control surfaces and rotators rotate one way or another depending on the sign of the input; pistons move one way or another depending on the sign of the input; beacon lights are on when the input is non-zero and off when zero. To implement FT such that 1 is true and -1 is false goes contrary to SP's own logic.
If backward compatibility is a concern, the number of builds using FT in a way that they would break from this is miniscule. The choice, then, is between letting a handful of builds force every future build to use twisted and inconsistent logic, versus correctness and simplicity going forward. The implications will be far-reaching.
+3@randomusername All my stuff is pretty cool.
+3@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.
+3