The following screenshots showcase collections of user created planes, built with the latest version of Lift.
FreakonFlight:
Cosmic Grenade:
b5cully:
The latest design challenge is to build a 1:1 scale plane based on a plane that has actually existed in the real world.
In the last screenshot, b5cully created the Hughes H-4 Hercules, which has the largest wingspan of any aircraft in history. As you can see, it dwarfs everything else.
Cosmic Grenade built a locomotive that actually flies, and FreakonFlight built a version of the Wright Flyer. That is just the tip of the iceberg; there are so many awesome and crazy planes being built.
For those of you who have played the game and also tried to build a plane, you might be thinking "how the hell is all this awesome stuff being built with such a crappy in game editor?". My answer for you is "I don't know". The current version of the plane builder was built out of necessity and is basically nothing more than a visualization tool for a text based interface. If the desire is strong enough, some people have stuck with it long enough to make some really awesome stuff. See above.
Based on what I've seen built so far, from pure insanity to extremely detailed realistic planes, I have come up with a few goals for what I would like to see from this game.
First and foremost, people need to be able to design and build whatever they want, regardless of whether or not it looks like it should fly. Some of the earliest creations in Lift blew any expectations out of the water. Just watch this gif.
I'm not sure there are words to describe what is happening here. Superman escorts flappy wing sky whale. Superman takes off and almost crashes. Superman almost ends up flying through the red ring. This scenario couldn't be scripted by any imagination.
Unfortunately, everything up until now has been built out of a collection of primitives for the various plane components. And they are all white. Ideally, I would like there to be a collection of different types of components to build planes out of and also the ability for experienced modders to model and build their own parts for the community to create planes with. This should include custom material types and textures, so the fantastical creations could be whatever you want them to be, and the realistic planes could be as realistic as possible.
Along with this would be the ability to build custom environments for people to fly around in. There are very few rules to obey when building an environment for flight, so allowing users to build their own environments opens up a huge world of opportunity.
Currently in the game there are a set of challenges to complete. I'm not sure where these challenges stand in the long term. An idea I'm tossing around is allowing users to build their own challenges, perhaps with custom logic in Lua scripts or even done with a plugin system. Currently there have been over 6000 attempts at the various challenges.
There are a lot of changes and improvements in the works for Lift. It is a very difficult game to figure out an exact plan for, but rest assured that everything that is done will be done with the best intentions.
Latest downloads:
How about adding weapons for maybe dogfighting in if there is gonna be a multiplayer
Definitely going to explore some of those ideas. Flying planes is much more fun when there are bombs and guns attached :)
what if you would add a symetry line in the middle and make creating the planes more easy by making it the dragging kind of placing like in KSP
for the rest love it
Yes, that is a good idea. There is some discussion and a simple test demonstration starting here in the primary dev log: Forums.tigsource.com
People are making some really cool stuff! How do some of these things fly, hahaha.
It's magic! smoke and mirrors and optical illusions :P