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[eigenbom]

Haha, had a lot of fun playing this! Having some stunts to do, rings to fly through etc., would be great.

[forsy]

Haha, had a lot of fun playing this! Having some stunts to do, rings to fly through etc., would be great.

Glad you enjoyed it! Still a lot of gameplay ideas to explore, and I'm definitely adding your suggestions to the list


Here is a rather large gif (~40mb) showing what happens when a plane gets trapped in the competing forces of 3 of those giant red magnets.

stuck between a magnet and a magnet

[BlueFeena]

I put some Toy Commander music on and had a rip roaring time chasing after planes with no pilots.  The fact that the heavy could fly better than I could without a pilot was a bit unnerving. 

I mean, this was like a modern day take on Pilotwings 64.  Holy shit this was fun.

[forsy]

I put some Toy Commander music on and had a rip roaring time chasing after planes with no pilots.  The fact that the heavy could fly better than I could without a pilot was a bit unnerving. 

I mean, this was like a modern day take on Pilotwings 64.  Holy shit this was fun.

Damn, that sounds like fun. What game were you playing? 

The heavy is actually a really shitty version of that plane that I built in haste. I've had one of similar design that has been a dream to fly.

I am struggling with how to maximize the value of having a really well designed plane in terms of gameplay. It's fun to try a new design and make something fly, but there is a pretty big window if all you want to do is get something off the ground and able to fly.

Is the solution to have different challenges like a Pilotwings game? Unless they were very fine tuned for a specific build in mind they would be achievable with any number of designs. After saying that out loud that actually sounds like a good thing.

Maybe I can take the idea eigenbom had and have different courses to run with rings to fly through, lets say 20. You could theoretically build a single plane to hit them all or build a plane with 20 smaller planes attached that you detach and fly through the rings with. I can't imagine a plane like that would fly very well but I guess that just emphasizes the sandbox approach to this game.

A ton of stuff to explore with combat related gameplay also. I really want to build a plane and add armor plating to the bottom of my wings and fuselage to protect from gunfire at the cost of weight and whatever other parameters are in play, such as cost.

Anyway, here is an errant missile reaching the limits of floating point accuracy:



This was at about 1000 m/s, and while still very stable in terms of flight path, you can see the precision starting to deteriorate.

[forsy]

Stalls! What a total pain in the ass!

I've spent some time today figuring out how to properly fix the weird stall issues, and it turns out it is not easy. A lot of the math behind this flight stuff is mostly formulas for estimating and trying to get close enough to real world behaviors. When doing normal, level flight these formulas work pretty well. They sort of break down and become not quite as useful when reaching stall conditions.

I've been looking at other flight games out there and stalls and their behavior is a pretty hot topic. People want to pull off real world maneuvers and see the game respond and react properly. While I'm not aiming for this to be a full scale flight simulator by any means, I want there to be at least some realism in what is happening. There are many different types of stalls and different results of each, so that just compounds the issue.

So, based on my findings and seeing how other games are dealing with it, my conclusion is that it's just really damn hard to implement properly. I've got it to a pretty good spot right now where it doesn't act in a head scratching manner, so I'll probably leave it for now.

As a bonus, I managed to get this biplane to do what appears to be a pretty good spin during a stall.

[Pishtaco]

In Venus Patrol I modelled stalls by just reducing the lift on a surface when the angle of attack is above about 15 degrees, as in the graphs here: http://www.aerospaceweb.org/question/airfoils/q0150b.shtml . This seems to work well enough - you can get into nasty spins if you aren't careful, although it isn't too hard to recover (unless your centre of gravity is too far back). What complications are you running in to?

[forsy]

In Venus Patrol I modelled stalls by just reducing the lift on a surface when the angle of attack is above about 15 degrees, as in the graphs here: http://www.aerospaceweb.org/question/airfoils/q0150b.shtml . This seems to work well enough - you can get into nasty spins if you aren't careful, although it isn't too hard to recover (unless your centre of gravity is too far back). What complications are you running in to?

That is essentially how I am handling it also, but I still run into what I'm assuming is unnatural behavior. Under the right conditions, I can end up so that I'm just sort of hanging there falling at a low speed but not necessarily in a stall. It looks like my nose should drop but I'm at just the right angle for all the forces to balance out in that position. Might just need to tweak my numbers a bit more.

I did manage to get into a pretty nasty spin though, so something is working right:

[Pishtaco]

Are you sure it's not the wings and tail stalling, with the centre of gravity too far back - as here: http://www.av8n.com/how/htm/aoastab.html#sec-too-far-aft ?

[forsy]

That is a great resource, thanks for the link.

I did play with the center of gravity and noticed some of that behavior when having it too far back. For the most part the flight characteristics in the game matched what was being described in that book.

However, after a good read and looking over my code I did noticed a couple minor calculation errors, and I refined my lift and drag coefficient graphs to better match what was shown in your other link. After all that I noticed my elevators were pretty small so I cranked up the size to see what would happen and sure enough I started stalling left and right. I guess I just wasn't pushing hard enough past the critical angle of attack.



The red dot is the center of gravity and the wings turn red when they are considered "stalled".

Based on the new size of the elevator and speed at which it can change angle, this plane is kind of a bitch to fly now but it's pretty agile if you can control it

[forsy]

I watched the movie Blown Away recently and wanted to test one of the contraptions in that movie, as seen in

.



Not the greatest gif, but it did not react the way I was hoping. The added weight of it being offset from center was definitely working and was a pain to deal with, but as I was testing the idea of having to keep it centered it just wasn't really working. Not in the way I was hoping anyway. I spent more time figuring out how to get it to shift to the left or right than I did having to deal with it behaving that way naturally.

Anyone have any ideas for how this concept might work?

[forsy]

I haven't had a whole lot of time to work on this lately, due to some contract work that wraps up around this time of the year and all this holiday business. Nothing like the stress of the holidays combined with the stress of crunch time. Just need a few of these  to get through the day! I still won't be able to commit much time to this for another couple weeks, but after that it's smooth sailing.


Anyway, tonight I took a break and opened up the editor and built the first thing that came to mind:



I can't stop staring at it, but that design is really creeping the shit out of me.


Hopefully in a few weeks I will have a more substantial update.

[forsy]

Alright, I am finally back and ready to dive into this stuff again.

First up, just some environment style testing.

Click for bigger size


Flying some bombs into the hole, never know what could be down there...



I've also changed the way the planes are stored and viewed. Before they were saved as text files locally, but I've set it up so when you save a plane in the builder it gets uploaded to the server. When you view the planes available to fly, it grabs all of the planes from the server and also provides a nice 3D preview of each plane.

This will allow for easy sharing, but there are some added complications with this type of system. Right now it is just one big pool of planes. If two people build a plane and give them the same name, someone will lose their work. There will have to be some kind of account system or some other way to organize it eventually. Adding accounts is not something I want to do, so maybe password protecting your planes would work and the names are first come first serve?

[eigenbom]

How about just using a URL system? If I make a plane I think it'd be awesome to just share a link that directly loads it up. So, for example, the following links would all start the game with custom built planes..

http://forsysliftgame.com/ddwdw764
http://forsysliftgame.com/abab03
http://forsysliftgame.com/44ffg56j

All these planes wouldn't be available to someone just visiting forsysliftgame.com -- instead you could have an automated (or manual) system to make the most popular planes accessible from the main game.

[Christian]

Really like the look of the new environment.

[forsy]

How about just using a URL system? If I make a plane I think it'd be awesome to just share a link that directly loads it up. So, for example, the following links would all start the game with custom built planes..

http://forsysliftgame.com/ddwdw764
http://forsysliftgame.com/abab03
http://forsysliftgame.com/44ffg56j

All these planes wouldn't be available to someone just visiting forsysliftgame.com -- instead you could have an automated (or manual) system to make the most popular planes accessible from the main game.

That is an awesome idea. I think I will take a stab at this immediately.

Really like the look of the new environment.

Thanks! I'm not an artist so I would like some style I can actually work with and produce. This style is nice because I can put it together and iterate on it quickly.

Here is another shot of a canyon. Also testing out some rings to fly through. They are fun to fly through, but I think there is a more creative approach to that type of gameplay, maybe something more physics oriented...

[Christian]

How about just using a URL system? If I make a plane I think it'd be awesome to just share a link that directly loads it up. So, for example, the following links would all start the game with custom built planes..

http://forsysliftgame.com/ddwdw764
http://forsysliftgame.com/abab03
http://forsysliftgame.com/44ffg56j

All these planes wouldn't be available to someone just visiting forsysliftgame.com -- instead you could have an automated (or manual) system to make the most popular planes accessible from the main game.

That is an awesome idea. I think I will take a stab at this immediately.

Really like the look of the new environment.

Thanks! I'm not an artist so I would like some style I can actually work with and produce. This style is nice because I can put it together and iterate on it quickly.

Yeah especially in that first screenshot, looks really good. Minimalist and stylized without feeling like it's early pre-alpha conceptual graphics (like that first demo area did). I mean that in a good way. Sometimes abstract style just seem cheap and off somehow, but the canyon looks like an interesting location.

And the abstract design means you're not chained to realistic environments. You can go as over-the-top and creative as you want, without it feeling extraneous.

The planes themselves probably need to be more refined, but the art just works for the world. Definitely want to try and survive flying in that hole.

[forsy]

The planes themselves probably need to be more refined, but the art just works for the world. Definitely want to try and survive flying in that hole.

I've been thinking a lot about this as well, but it is kind of complicated. Right now the plane components are built from code using parameters defined in the plane builder. The physics involved are also based on those parameters. So a wing that is 4x2 will look exactly that size and the physics will also be calculated using that size. Same with the other types of components.

There is also no restrictions on how components can be placed in relation to the other components. This allows you to literally build whatever you want, however you want it. Unless it is designed properly though, it won't fly.

On the flip side is having a collection of prebuilt components that look pretty, but not having the ability to have them be completely user defined. Another trick is having the physics match the visuals in a believable way.

Here is an example of some components a friend of mine built after he saw how lame the planes looked  

(click for larger view)

[Christian]

Have you seen Sky Rogue?


Would be cool if we could make a sleek plane like that.

[forsy]

Have you seen Sky Rogue?

Would be cool if we could make a sleek plane like that.

I hadn't seen that before. Unfortunately, in order for something to look as slick as that the different components would need to be prebuilt, similar to the screenshot I just posted with the parts. It would be great to be able to drop in parts to make a plane look like the one in that gif, but also allow the user to adjust the shape and design of the different parts to allow not only visual customization but also have control over the flight characteristics of the plane. I feel the need to preserve that as much as possible because it is kind of the foundation for this whole project.

There is a balance here, just need to explore some ideas to find it. Thanks for starting the discussion on this, I was sort of avoiding it

[forsy]

Plane URLs!

http://www.czkproject.com/lift/70a4b
http://www.czkproject.com/lift/619u5
http://www.czkproject.com/lift/6f05b

and to see all the planes
http://www.czkproject.com/lift/



I really dig this system, it couldn't be any easier for sharing creations.

I don't have a proper environment set up to fly around in at the moment, but you can still have some fun with the planes. Click one to check it out.

There were some complications introduced with this system, such as version compatibility. Due to still being very early in development, things change quickly. Plane A might work with version 1 but no longer work in version 2. To remedy this I've set it up to track which version the plane was created with and default to loading that version of the web player when loading it.

Another complication is integrating the attachment system. Right now attachments are standalone planes, but stored as a name, position, and rotation when attaching to another plane. As of now the system only loads the plane in question based on the link. The attachments will have to be loaded as well, but that currently isn't supported. I had a few more planes built, such as the one with the bombs in the previous posts, but I had to delete it for now. It shouldn't be too hard to add that functionality but since it did not work out of the box I will probably go back to the drawing board on the attachment system and see if there is a better way to handle it.

I will also need to come up with a proper domain name for this project.