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[forsy]

Yes!

Well done sir, you just beat the game. The final challenge was going to be to figure out how to get a ball of fuselage at least 100 feet in the air.

It took me a good thirty seconds to figure out what the hell was going on   This actually shouldn't be possible but I changed the code recently to make all fuselage "unbreakable". I was just testing something and meant to change it back but never did. I will probably expose that along with the other parameters related to breaking eventually.

Oh god, some of these gifs are hilarious, loving the look of the game! Do you have a Twitter I can follow?

Thanks! I don't have a twitter account set up yet, but since you have shown interest I will be sure to set one up and get back to you

[forsy]

Not sure where this one came from, but someone made it. I think the name is supposed to be 'Birdy'.




Pretty fun to fly. Took a few tries to get to the bottom of the pit with it

Fly it!

I'm going to have to be sure all these first planes and "other creations" get saved and go into a museum

[forsy]

0.1.1 is live!

Play!
Linux 64bit



Some planes included in the build:
'heli'
'011'
'two prop speedo'
'6 prop weirdo'

General changes in 0.1.1:
- added a "publish" system. There is a button in the edit screen to "publish" your plane. This allows you to add your name and some notes, and it basically finalizes a build. Once it is published there is no more editing.

Main menu:
- added a "clone & edit" option
- added some filters for viewing published and non published planes.
- author and notes are displayed for published planes

Edit menu:
- added a quit button
- added a proper save interface
- added a publish interface for entering name and notes prior to publishing
- added a toggle on the wing sub menu for selecting which type of wing it is, "left aileron", "right aileron", "elevator", "rudder". This is much easier than keeping track of wing names.


Unfortunately, previous versions are not compatible with these changes, so all the old planes are lost forever! Just kidding, you can still access them with direct links. I will have to put a webpage up to keep track of all of the plane links.

Anyway, thanks for reading and playing!

edit: I've updated the first post of this thread with links to all the old planes for now.
edit2: Added '6 prop weirdo'

[oodavid]

LINUX! What a champ.

That's pretty cool, the sandbox environment is pretty cool

[eigenbom]

That Birdy one is pretty sweet. :D

As for backwards compatibility/preservation, I wouldn't spend any time on it atm. Move fast and break things! You can worry about preserving planes when you have 100s of users.

[forsy]

LINUX! What a champ.

That's pretty cool, the sandbox environment is pretty cool

Thanks. I can't really take any credit for the linux stuff, unity is pretty good at being cross platform

That Birdy one is pretty sweet. :D

As for backwards compatibility/preservation, I wouldn't spend any time on it atm. Move fast and break things! You can worry about preserving planes when you have 100s of users.

Yeah I'm not really concerned about backwards compatibility at this point. I feel like I should still point it out and make people aware of it, so when you load the new version up and see your stuff gone you don't just assume I'm an asshole

As for  preservation... the way the system is set up, preservation is a given. All the planes are stored in the DB with a version field, and each version has a separate player location on the server. I think this is very important, not just for my own personal satisfaction but for others as well. If this didn't exist, then there is no way for newcomers to enjoy the Birdy creation for example. Or the eigenball. We will look back one day and have a good chuckle over that one.

I'm still waiting for someone to claim ownership on Birdy by the way

[eigenbom]

I made a flyable plane, woo! It's called shorty and it's based off your two prop plane.

Some more editor suggestions: undo/redo, move things around in the hierarchy view, when coming back from f11 test you should restore the last camera position. Undo/Redo is especially important I think, from a dev point of view, as its a core architectural decision.

If you want/need any help, I might be able to find some time to help with the editor.

[forsy]

Damn, that plane is easy to stall and eventually crash on takeoff. I should have put in the stall indicator. I was thinking that plane would be good at avoiding missiles, but I took a direct hit and had probably the most violent explosion I've seen yet

Good suggestions for the editor, I will make some notes.

You make a very good point about the undo/redo. The way the editor was coded, it probably wouldn't be terribly difficult to add support for that. There is a single function for each component that is called when changes are made. That function grabs all the data from the appropriate fields and applies it to that component.

For example, when you change the size of the aileron on the wing, or even the position of the wing, it calls the UpdateWing function. That function applies the values of all the wing properties to the wing and then tells the wing to rebuild itself. The rebuild function rebuilds the mesh and recalculates the physics properties, etc.

I could just store all of that data each time a change is made and fairly easily have an undo/redo system. How elegant that is, I don't really know, I've never done undo/redo before I guess a better way would be to eliminate all the excess overhead and only store the values that change.

I was kind of hoping to have figured out a long term plan for the game sooner than later so I could rethink and/or redo the editor based on those decisions. Like what if ultimately there isn't this low level editing going on and it is more of a drag and drop interface.

I think I will take you up on your offer to help. Probably not right away though, I want some of these new developments to settle and sink in a bit. Words words words is anyone still reading this wall of text? 

[Christian]

Damn, that plane is easy to stall and eventually crash on takeoff. I should have put in the stall indicator. I was thinking that plane would be good at avoiding missiles, but I took a direct hit and had probably the most violent explosion I've seen yet

GIF please

[forsy]

I tried about 20 more times and couldn't get a solid hit. I guess it is good at avoiding missiles after all.

However, there is a new creation on the server.

It's a bird! It's a plane! It's a... what the hell is it??





"Man Of Steel" created by "The Amazing BB"
"OK there is a trick to flying this manly man. You gotta go full throttle and pull up at and slightly right to keep our supes level. Then it's plane sailing. Plain sailing. Sailing planes."

[GalaethGames]

awesome.

Really like the 0b11, how it almost glides, it's the only one I've got all the way down the shaft

I made my first successful plane, a 6 engine bomber, this game is already too fun

[forsy]

awesome.

Really like the 0b11, how it almost glides, it's the only one I've got all the way down the shaft

I made my first successful plane, a 6 engine bomber, this game is already too fun

Nice! I love those old bomber planes. I definitely want to add in some kind of bombing run type of gameplay. Design some bombs and a bomber and go do some damage! Maybe have different warheads with different weight and damage properties. Maybe some napalm?

I see your other experiment also, the 'back engine'. I can honestly say I have not built a plane with wings that big before Works pretty well though.

One of my next priorities is getting the attachment system working again with all these new changes. Then you can do some really crazy stuff.

[Christian]

How do I make missiles appear while playing?

[forsy]

How do I make missiles appear while playing?

They show up when you press the "fly vs missiles" button on the main menu. Once they fire you have to go back to the menu (escape key) and start over for them to show up again.

Maybe there should be a button for that, or a timer...

[eigenbom]

As tedious as it is, I think the best way to undo/redo is to use the command pattern, and a stack. Each command is a single operation, like "change parameter", "add component", etc., and has a redo() and undo() function. E.g., Change parameter would be a class that remembers which parameter it's changing, and the old value of the param. On undo it simply changes the parameter back.

I too imagine a drag and drop interface, like the builders in spore, with widgets for adjusting component parameters, rotation, etc. Changing colours and applying decals and other visual doodads would also be fun.

[failrate]

The way he's got his commands set up, he could put in an operation stack that gets pushed each update and popped during undos.  So, he could definitely do what you recommended without radical changes.

[eigenbom]

True -- if the number of operations in a creation is small then you won't even need to provide the inverse operation, you just rebuild the entire thing whenever you undo. To speed it up you could snapshot the whole model every N operations, kind of like what they do with time-reversing games.

I always liked the idea of postscript or for 3D: GML as a file format for drawings/models, because it stores all the operations required to build a thing. GML is probably overkill for this project, but modelling a plane as a series of construction operations would fit well with undo/redo.

Have you thought about the user being able to edit levels etc? If so, then I imagine the undo/redo stack would be the same, so it might help to think about both at once.

[forsy]

Thanks for the discussion and ideas guys.

I'm just going to do whatever is easiest and quickest for the time being. I think having undo/redo is important enough to put in right now but given the state of everything I don't see any reason to go overboard on the implementation. It seems like the easiest might be to just snapshot the whole thing after every operation. The data is pretty light but not optimized at all for this so I will have to do some tests but I think the implementation should be fairly quick and painless.

GML is interesting. I will have to think about that for a while and read up on it some more. On the surface it looks really cool but I'm not immediately seeing the pros and cons of using it for this project.

You mentioned level editing. That comes up in my head from time to time and I am interested in exploring some ideas but I don't have any set plans for it.  It would be great if the same undo/redo system could be used for both plane and level editing so I will definitely keep it in mind as the systems mature and evolve.

I wish I had a fun gif or screenshot to post to lighten the mood  after all this boring serious stuff but I'm not home at the moment

[forsy]

Just posting to say there is some crazy stuff on the server right now thanks to eigenbom, BB (billyboob?) and sionco. Can't post any screenshots yet but it's pretty awesome stuff.

"JAWS"
"Sky Whale Has Eyes Now"
"whale-o-copter"

just to name a few of the published ones... a bunch of cool stuff in the unpublished section also.

So glad I put the notes in, reading those is half the fun

Check em out

[forsy]

A sample of stuff people have built.

click to enlarge