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[forsy]

It's going to be really hard balancing realism with fun, but I know you can do it. Looking at the latest gifs the model seems far more realistic now. I'll be back soon to see how you're going and have another attempt at building a plane.

I took the 100th post so I guess I have to take the 200th also.

The way the system works now, with the new changes and everything, nobody is really going to have any issues adjusting to how it works. It was all trial and error before, so it will be just the same with different subtle nuances to pay attention to.

My concern with realism vs fun is how the editor works. In order for this to be accessible to the masses I have to build some kind of drag and drop functionality. My gut instinct says that will destroy the "sky whales" and "enterprises" of the world, maybe even the drunk wasps, but I don't know how else to make it work. At this point these planes are entirely custom. If there were no customization you'd be limited to what I provided in terms of prebuilt components... sounds boring doesn't it? Do you know how many "logical" rules are broken in some of these designs?

Maybe I can do an entire game around the "challenges" that I tried to do with user built planes. The community that wants to build realistic or crazy ass planes can, and the community that just wants to fly will be able to. Unfortunately this will still exclude the people that want to build planes but don't want to figure out the editor.

I'll be honest though, nothing puts a bigger smile on my face than seeing a new plane built without any limitations to the design.

[Juan Raigada]

In order for this to be accessible to the masses I have to build some kind of drag and drop functionality. My gut instinct says that will destroy the "sky whales" and "enterprises" of the world, maybe even the drunk wasps, but I don't know how else to make it work. At this point these planes are entirely custom. If there were no customization you'd be limited to what I provided in terms of prebuilt components... sounds boring doesn't it? Do you know how many "logical" rules are broken in some of these designs?

Can you just have two editors? A polished drag and drop one and a more complex, less polished totally custom one...

I've been following this for a while, and I love where this is going. In my head it's a sort of steampunky Kerbal Space Program...

[forsy]

In order for this to be accessible to the masses I have to build some kind of drag and drop functionality. My gut instinct says that will destroy the "sky whales" and "enterprises" of the world, maybe even the drunk wasps, but I don't know how else to make it work. At this point these planes are entirely custom. If there were no customization you'd be limited to what I provided in terms of prebuilt components... sounds boring doesn't it? Do you know how many "logical" rules are broken in some of these designs?

Can you just have two editors? A polished drag and drop one and a more complex, less polished totally custom one...

I've been following this for a while, and I love where this is going. In my head it's a sort of steampunky Kerbal Space Program...

steampunky kerbal space program... I like it. Been thinking about theme and what not lately, so now I'll probably be dancing around that idea all weekend

I think having two editors was mentioned a while back also. I just wrote down some ideas for a little spin-off game to explore a different kind of editor, more drag and drop focused like KSP or similar games. It will also have all prebuilt pieces which is another idea I want to test.

I don't really want to develop those ideas in the same project as Lift because I think it will require some significant changes and could take a lot of time. I'd also like to avoid potentially breaking or preventing updates to Lift. Plus this mini game is going to be awesome all by itself

[eigenbom]

Spore has a drag and drop editor and it's very flexible in terms of what you can build. Embedding shapes in other shapes could still be possible by allowing the user to manually change the cords after placement...?

[forsy]

Spore has a drag and drop editor and it's very flexible in terms of what you can build. Embedding shapes in other shapes could still be possible by allowing the user to manually change the cords after placement...?

Yeah that looks really good. The mirroring will be very important. I've actually had a mirror button on my todo list for a while.

There has to be some level of accuracy and precision as well. Placing a rudder for example, if that isn't perfectly centered the plane won't fly very well. So there has to be flexibility like what spore has but also some kind of intelligent snapping.

[failrate]

Two things that should help a little:
- Editors should always have a basic mode and an advanced mode
- Balloons

[forsy]

Two things that should help a little:
- Editors should always have a basic mode and an advanced mode
- Balloons

Alright, you've sold me on having a basic and advanced mode. Now tell me more about these balloons.


Also, if there are any math/physics gurus out there that want to help me work through a problem, please PM me. I'm not even sure how to properly google the question. It is about spreading the mass of an object over an arbitrary number of points while maintaining a desired center of gravity. I'll figure it out eventually but it doesn't seem like it should be as complicated as I'm making it out to be.


And a crosspost from the screenshot saturday thread, because this has to go here also:


Looks like I need to start adding a bit more color and come up with a new environment!

[billyboob]

Woo! Two editors. Would be good to be able to save/upload individual components (tagging is fun!). The next build sounds like a doozy.

Also. Balloon micro-transactions. Make it happen.

[Pishtaco]

Unity should model the mass and moment of inertia of a cylinder correctly; there should be no need to spread the mass along it to get proper behaviour. Unfortunately the documentation for this in unity is terrible.

[forsy]

Woo! Two editors. Would be good to be able to save/upload individual components (tagging is fun!). The next build sounds like a doozy.

Also. Balloon micro-transactions. Make it happen.

Saving individual components is on my list again as well. I actually have the code in place to handle it to an extent. I ended up just commenting all of that code out because it was a little bit of overkill at the time and it didn't seem all that useful. Given how things are going I think it will be good to look at it again. One of the ideas I had with that was to do daily challenges or something, where a random collection of components would be generated and people would have to build what they could with those parts. I'm sure that was brought up at some point earlier in the thread.

Also FYI, due to recent demands for balloons, development will be on hold for a while so I can go set up a kickstarter campaign specifically to pay for the development of balloons and balloon micro-transactions.

[forsy]

Unity should model the mass and moment of inertia of a cylinder correctly; there should be no need to spread the mass along it to get proper behaviour. Unfortunately the documentation for this in unity is terrible.

While this is accurate for the most part, especially the documentation bit, there are some limitations. The first one is described here:

http://answers.unity3d.com/questions/398353/how-do-i-programmatically-combine-inertia-tensors.html

Now, in Unity, I realize you can have multiple colliders as children of a rigidbody and Unity automatically calculates the COG and InertiaTensor for the rigidbody based on all the colliders, but with one major drawback. It assumes that all the colliders have exactly the same density. It spreads all the mass of the rigidbody out evenly across the combined volumes of all the colliders. As a result, something like an empty carbon fiber cockpit would way as much as an engine of the same size, made entirely of metal.

That is a pretty significant limitation. He goes on to propose alternate solutions like having each component be its own rigidbody and attach with joints or something, but that is not good. I think KSP does something like that and they appear to have pretty significant performance problems with a huge number of parts. In Lift, there is a single rigidbody for a plane and the inertia tensor and center of gravity are calculated based on the components and their properties. I'm not an expert on the subject and my math is probably not entirely correct with the inertia tensor calculation, but it is giving the results I want for now. (comparing my calculations with what unity comes up with, the numbers are similar yet different enough to notice a difference)

Having complete control over this is also good for potentially adding other types of gameplay elements, like inertia dampers.


The primary reason for wanting to spread the mass out over the component is to have behavior like what was shown a few posts ago with the falling cylinders. I would like to have multiple points to apply physics over a body in order to have a more accurate simulation.

Even bypassing all of my custom code and using Unity out of the box, doing the falling cylinder tests results in the same behavior as I was seeing with my code and a single simulation point. It just isn't good enough.

Better results can be achieved by a user making a plane out of a ton of smaller components, but I think it would be better to do this automatically with code. I blame this quest on you since you pointed out the problems with the enterprise

[failrate]

A balloon is generally a round shape.  It produces lift regardless of acceleration, but at the cost of significant drag.  A functioning whale would consist of one large oblong balloon, with flapping wings for flippers and tail.  An alternate design would be the classic dirigible with propellors.  Tint them red for Hydrogen balloons 

[forsy]

A balloon is generally a round shape.  It produces lift regardless of acceleration, but at the cost of significant drag.  A functioning whale would consist of one large oblong balloon, with flapping wings for flippers and tail.  An alternate design would be the classic dirigible with propellors.  Tint them red for Hydrogen balloons 

Maybe you could even match speeds with it and hook on with your plane... where have I heard that before...

Hooking on to a carrier: http://www.britishpathe.com/video/first-plane-carrying-airship-aka-first-plane-carrr

We've come full circle, and now balloons must be implemented.

[forsy]

I couldn't resist. I had to put my life on hold and make this happen.



So close...

edit: to clarify, what you are seeing is just a modified sky whale flying at cruising altitude, no balloons

[eigenbom]

Woah that's pretty cool.

[forsy]

Fuck you, sky whale  

20 tries later I finally latch on.



Such an elegant dismount, 10/10. And in a furious rage I try to take him out of the sky after I dismount, but hes just too fat, and I fail again.

I've uploaded all the attempts here if you want to watch various levels of failure. Good for some plane on plane physics action at the very least: http://www.czkproject.com/files/lift/skywhalefail/

[Deraj]

I think there might be one too many animated GIFs on the first page of this thread--it crashed my phone. Not just the browser on my phone. The entire phone

Cool project, though

[forsy]

I think there might be one too many animated GIFs on the first page of this thread--it crashed my phone. Not just the browser on my phone. The entire phone

Cool project, though

Sorry about that

I keep adding random stuff to the first page, maybe I need to start subtracting stuff also. I'm sure those first gifs I made could use some optimizations also.

Anyway, give the game a try, I promise it won't crash

[Tuism]

Just wanted to say how much I love this sandbox idea even just looking at the gifs The love that everyone puts into their creations is great to see Customisation is king!

[GalaethGames]

Fuck you, sky whale  

20 tries later I finally latch on.



Such an elegant dismount, 10/10. And in a furious rage I try to take him out of the sky after I dismount, but hes just too fat, and I fail again.

I've uploaded all the attempts here if you want to watch various levels of failure. Good for some plane on plane physics action at the very least: http://www.czkproject.com/files/lift/skywhalefail/

damn you whale!!!!