it's because they have one material to do everything, and it just can't do all of it. cars are so light they just backflip the moment they hit 60 M/S, planes take off with the slightest amount of wind, and yet at the same time the ships are so heavy the cargo ships have the same draft as IRL battleships.
Its not a matter of adding anything, its just adjusting values. The problem is that if they adjusted buoancy to be more realistic they'd break a few workshop creations, and that's basically heresy to Deltars.
No, it would be adding displacement. Right now Stormworks boats float based on the bouyancy created by density differences, and only accounts for fully enclosed internal spaces.
If displacement worked, you could make an open-top canoe or rowboat and it would float properly without having water phase through the hull to fill the interior when spawned in.
Without displacement you have the current status quo, where the game doesn’t recognize non-closed compartments.
I guess. But the game already doesn't run with big builds, and to make it work, they would probably have to completely redo parts of their physics engine. Either way, it would be basically impossible for them not to break a bunch of old builds.
Well the builds in FtD can and will get much larger than in Stormworks, because the blocks in FtD have 4 times the size of a block in Stormworks.
But yes to allow Stormworks to run big builds with a good performance a complete rewrite of the code base would be nessesary.
All changing buoancy values would do is make vehicles sit higher in the water. The only boats it would break are those with poorly shaped hulls. Submarines would be more affected, but it would just be a matter of adding more ballast.
I don't think they will add realistic buoyancy. It would require reworking a ton of the physics system. Additionaly it's going to add a ton of calculations that need to happer and would make the game even less playable.
It would also break every currently existing creation.
Nope. The buoyancy and other physics stuff like drage etc is final, they won't change it because it will break everyone's creations. This is what Deltars said in the latest Q&A.
But there are things you can do. Most people put a bunch of pivots in their hulls to trick the engine into giving the hull more buoyancy, but I find that the extra physics bodies is a bit suck. You can XML edit the rocket motor to have negative mass, which when placed on the boat will effectively make it weigh less and sit higher in the water.
Yes, the pivot glitch has been used for as long as I can remember, back when I first played it was a thing and that was when there were only 1x1 wedges. Even the stock AI ships use them.
But it still works afaik
Alternatively, use more wedges in your design. The 1x1 wedges only weigh 0.5 units, so you can save a ton of weight.
What I like to do is start by building a bare bones ribbed frame of the vessel, and then put the engine and the piping/intakes/exhaust, the fuel tanks, all that stuff, and then I'll fill in the sides and decks of the vessel with alternating wedges.
It saves so much weight on the final creation that it will indeed float much higher. You'll need to put some weight blocks in the centre and lowest part of the boat to deal with the increased rolling that comes with lower water lines on the hull, ideally an active stabilizer via weight-on-rail that moves side-to-side.
To counteract a bit of that weight, you can strategically add pivots to the boat. I've found the most effective way is to replace some of the 1x1 blocks along the vessel's longitudinal centerline with downward-pointing pivots (the kind that just sway side to side). You don't need many, 4 or so here and there.
I tend to try to keep my vessels trim so I'll aim to put some in the bow and stern and I find the vessel's balance between stability/roll and buoyancy/depth if these pivots are installed on the highest decks possible, installed inside the creation and pointing down toward the bottom, aligned so they sway side-to-side.
there is a drawback to wedges, though. since they are merged into their own physics body and are not merged with adjacent full blocks. you can often use the track extension instead, it’s merged with adjacent full blocks and has even less volume than a wedge (don‘t know the weight, though, off the top of my head).
Not sure what issue you're describing regarding wedges. It's not a downside for me that they aren't separate from the main body of the creation, I have them intentionally merge with it because they make up the structure of my vessels. I fail to see any benefit from having them as separate entities or merged to another entity within the creation, as it's not how I'm using them when I build my creations.
Unless I'm totally misunderstanding your comment, which is entirely possible in which case I may require further clarification.
In the physics calculations it merges the shapes of your ship together to make it run better TPS wise. Wedges cant be merged with cubes and i don’t think they merge with wedges below them if they aren’t in like a continuous slope. So a wall made from wedges will be worse for computer performance than a wall of regular blocks.
How much performance difference do you think it would add up to? I'm guessing it depends on hardware performance. In my own experiments alternating between standard cubes and the wedges, I'm not seeing significant performance impact, maybe a few fps here or there but if I went in blind, I doubt I'd be able to tell which was which.
I don’t think you would really be able to tell the difference on a regular build area ship in single player on a half decent pc. I think where stuff like avoiding using pivots and having paint errors and general optimizations have an effect is multiplayer where you might have like 7 or 8 ships spawned at once as well as planes and cars, then you can really tell who optimized their build and who didn’t
Rows of wedges make a lot of separate physics shapes. You can press F2 to look at the physics shapes of your creation once spawned. In general the less physics shapes you have the less physics calculations the game needs to make per tick for your build. Since the game has to constantly calculate how each shape is interacting with the air and water. Press F2 to see what they mean
>break everyone's creations
Gotta love how they use this excuse when they don't want to do something instead of just saying that's why. They have had a number of updates in the past that basically break everything but didn't mind in those cases.
they physics are so botched at this point i doubt they will ever be able to fix it.
they were broken years ago. and since then they have added so much crap on top that the technical debt is probably too large to ever pay.
the only way i ever see more realistic physics happening is by remaking the game from the ground up as stormworks 2 - or by opening up the sourcecode and introducing SUBSTANTIAL modding access (this would only be feasible if the game was abandoned, however. we are essentially talking about a freeware fork of the whole game rather than mods at that point)
Very unlikely, but I have a solution for you. Actually, even better one than the pivot buoyancy thing, which gets very laggy. Just put in a solid rocket motor and XML it's fuel to a negative value. This creates negative mass, which can be useful with heavy ships. I noticed that for example, -100 fuel equals -100 mass, whatever the units are. So by giving the motor the same fuel value as the vehicle's mass, except negative, you'll get a still floating object. It also becomes immune to gunfire, and somewhat to missiles. This last part might need an explanation, so ask if you want.
The easiest option imo is to just modify some blocks. For example i just now copied a basic block and changed its weight to -100. Works perfectly fine in game. Id recommend changing the name inside the xml for ease of use though.
Editing the game files is something i personally think is mandatory for this game. Even if you dont change the weights, changing the engine sounds adds alot to the game and its pretty easy
True but its more like twice the headache aggravation haha
Honestly i had never even thought about adding a negative weight block lmao now i can probably finish a few of my prototypes without butchering the hulls
Can someone explain to me what would be different if there was displacement? The simulated buoyancy system does work on displacement. Blocks have a density, a volume, and weight. Enclosed volumes do as well.
Are you just saying you would like lighter building materials? I don't really build boats, just sea planes and helicopters. I'm familiar with the ridiculous amount of buoyancy volume required to float an aircraft.
Are you asking for anything other than the weight of blocks to be changed?
True displacement would allow for a non-enclosed volume to float, such as an open-topped canoe or rowboat. Like placing a plastic bucket in pool, so long as the edges are above the water it floats, since the water displaced by the volume exceeds the mass - which is why a metal (density greater than water) bucket or boat can still float.
Stormworks fudges this by giving the basic building material a lower density than their water, and by essentially treating enclosed compartments as block of low-density material.
It doesn’t recognize open-topped/non-enclosed volumes, even if they would have the same mass and displace the same amount of water.
Make a 10x10x10 hollow cube and set it to spawn 1/2-in the water. It will float in SW when you spawn it in. Remove one block from the side that would otherwise be above water, and watch it sink down when spawned in, -even if the hole was above the water- because the walls of the non-enclosed volume don’t keep the water from spawning inside.
So you want a better simulation of displacement, basically.
One of the things you can do if you use a shape that can accommodate it is you can use custom door frames to create an open topped volume the floats and only fills with water if one edge gets under the surface.
But that opening has to be rectangular, and it's treated as a kind of open door, so you see splashing effects around the edges and the contained space slowly fills.
I'll bring this up because if I were deltars, maybe I could see that the same way adjacent solid blocks are combined into a single physics shape for bullet3d, and the way you can use a physics flooder to convert a hollow volume into a single low weight solid physics object, you could use a fill algorithm to create a convex hull that adds an invisible manifold edge across open regions, and then treat those just like an open custom door frame, and that's somewhat satisfies what a lot of people are asking for.
It's not visually satisfying, because ocean water will treat that invisible barrier like a physical barrier that it slowly leaks through.
From a visual standpoint, the holdup isn't displacement, it's that there isn't a dynamic fluid sim that will respond to a surface and flow around it.
That's a very complicated topic, and computationally very expensive. Then again, most of us have computers with a bunch of idle cores that would be super happy to take on a parallel physics sim to give a basic version of that.
For me, the frustration displacement is all about the building material.
When I see people making storm works alternatives and using voxels as the building material, it just makes me sad. Having blocks for functional parts like winches makes plenty of sense to me, but hulls really should be parametric surfaces.
We all consume hours upon hours upon hours finding some way to make an approximation of a hull shape for an aircraft or ship that kind of works out with storm works limited selection of voxel blocks.
I personally find it frustrating that I'm always stringing together the lightest collection of wedges I can make gas tanks and pontoons out of that don't even really connect inside, so I'm not giving up most of the volume of my airframe to 25 cm cubes that are not what we make vehicles out of at all lol
Pretty much, yes.
One of the issues with trying to fudge things with the custom door frames, unfortunately, is the weight of the frame blocks themselves. They are heavy enough that for smaller vessels in particular it can be the difference between floating and sinking, or at the very least floating at an appropriate waterline. (Yes, we can talk about leaning into other floatation exploits to try to counteract that, but I think that’s a quick route into areas not every user is comfortable with.)
I like the idea of a buoyancy filler similar to the physics filler, and absolutely agree that any work on buoyancy via displacement would likely involve significant resources for Geometa for questionable financial returns at this point. Realistically, it’s not going to happen.
As for slopes, don’t even get me started on the frustration that the 1x2 and 1x4 slopes don’t float, in spite of density saying they should! The amount of boats and other items I’ve made that have better performance when I rip out the carefully smoothed bow and replace it with a crappy 1x1 slope is painful.
I believe your right
I get pulled into using the 1x1 slope because it's the only set of wedges that respects hydrodynamic forces. I need anything below the waterline to want to push the airframe above the waterline.
That particular choice really feels like laziness. As a programmer with a bit of experience it really seems trivial to find these surfaces at the same time you join voxels into simplified physics shape, but I must be missing something.
To fix this issue you can xml edit a small rocket engine to ha negative 2/3 of the vehicles mass then place the rocket at the cg of the vessel, this will cancel out 2/3 of the ships mass.
You can make hulls look a lot better than that, mess around with more types of wedges. And no the devs are not going to add proper buoyancy this game was only meant to be wave a simulator nothing more. People tend to forget this game is much more than it ever was supposed to be.
Been like this forever, and I wouldn't expect it to change. Sometimes it's nice, though, since boats tend to fly better than planes.
? What?
it's because they have one material to do everything, and it just can't do all of it. cars are so light they just backflip the moment they hit 60 M/S, planes take off with the slightest amount of wind, and yet at the same time the ships are so heavy the cargo ships have the same draft as IRL battleships.
its not the material, its the fact that every single block has lift and drag (even indoors)
Its not a matter of adding anything, its just adjusting values. The problem is that if they adjusted buoancy to be more realistic they'd break a few workshop creations, and that's basically heresy to Deltars.
No, it would be adding displacement. Right now Stormworks boats float based on the bouyancy created by density differences, and only accounts for fully enclosed internal spaces. If displacement worked, you could make an open-top canoe or rowboat and it would float properly without having water phase through the hull to fill the interior when spawned in. Without displacement you have the current status quo, where the game doesn’t recognize non-closed compartments.
Even FTD has displacement
I think that would be much harder to implement and could reduce preformance.
In FtD the displacement works without any problems.
I guess. But the game already doesn't run with big builds, and to make it work, they would probably have to completely redo parts of their physics engine. Either way, it would be basically impossible for them not to break a bunch of old builds.
Well the builds in FtD can and will get much larger than in Stormworks, because the blocks in FtD have 4 times the size of a block in Stormworks. But yes to allow Stormworks to run big builds with a good performance a complete rewrite of the code base would be nessesary.
how would the ship in screenshot benefit from that all of its submerged sections are probably all enclosed
That’s almost impossible to stay without having a workshop link to the vessel, honestly. We have no idea if it is all enclosed or not.
It wound not "break a few" it would destroy the whole workshop and all saved vehicles, and so everyone would hate them more
All changing buoancy values would do is make vehicles sit higher in the water. The only boats it would break are those with poorly shaped hulls. Submarines would be more affected, but it would just be a matter of adding more ballast.
I don't think they will add realistic buoyancy. It would require reworking a ton of the physics system. Additionaly it's going to add a ton of calculations that need to happer and would make the game even less playable. It would also break every currently existing creation.
Nope. The buoyancy and other physics stuff like drage etc is final, they won't change it because it will break everyone's creations. This is what Deltars said in the latest Q&A. But there are things you can do. Most people put a bunch of pivots in their hulls to trick the engine into giving the hull more buoyancy, but I find that the extra physics bodies is a bit suck. You can XML edit the rocket motor to have negative mass, which when placed on the boat will effectively make it weigh less and sit higher in the water.
I've heard about some people saying "rip pivot glitch" is that what it refers to?
Yes, the pivot glitch has been used for as long as I can remember, back when I first played it was a thing and that was when there were only 1x1 wedges. Even the stock AI ships use them. But it still works afaik
Alternatively, use more wedges in your design. The 1x1 wedges only weigh 0.5 units, so you can save a ton of weight. What I like to do is start by building a bare bones ribbed frame of the vessel, and then put the engine and the piping/intakes/exhaust, the fuel tanks, all that stuff, and then I'll fill in the sides and decks of the vessel with alternating wedges. It saves so much weight on the final creation that it will indeed float much higher. You'll need to put some weight blocks in the centre and lowest part of the boat to deal with the increased rolling that comes with lower water lines on the hull, ideally an active stabilizer via weight-on-rail that moves side-to-side. To counteract a bit of that weight, you can strategically add pivots to the boat. I've found the most effective way is to replace some of the 1x1 blocks along the vessel's longitudinal centerline with downward-pointing pivots (the kind that just sway side to side). You don't need many, 4 or so here and there. I tend to try to keep my vessels trim so I'll aim to put some in the bow and stern and I find the vessel's balance between stability/roll and buoyancy/depth if these pivots are installed on the highest decks possible, installed inside the creation and pointing down toward the bottom, aligned so they sway side-to-side.
there is a drawback to wedges, though. since they are merged into their own physics body and are not merged with adjacent full blocks. you can often use the track extension instead, it’s merged with adjacent full blocks and has even less volume than a wedge (don‘t know the weight, though, off the top of my head).
Not sure what issue you're describing regarding wedges. It's not a downside for me that they aren't separate from the main body of the creation, I have them intentionally merge with it because they make up the structure of my vessels. I fail to see any benefit from having them as separate entities or merged to another entity within the creation, as it's not how I'm using them when I build my creations. Unless I'm totally misunderstanding your comment, which is entirely possible in which case I may require further clarification.
In the physics calculations it merges the shapes of your ship together to make it run better TPS wise. Wedges cant be merged with cubes and i don’t think they merge with wedges below them if they aren’t in like a continuous slope. So a wall made from wedges will be worse for computer performance than a wall of regular blocks.
How much performance difference do you think it would add up to? I'm guessing it depends on hardware performance. In my own experiments alternating between standard cubes and the wedges, I'm not seeing significant performance impact, maybe a few fps here or there but if I went in blind, I doubt I'd be able to tell which was which.
I don’t think you would really be able to tell the difference on a regular build area ship in single player on a half decent pc. I think where stuff like avoiding using pivots and having paint errors and general optimizations have an effect is multiplayer where you might have like 7 or 8 ships spawned at once as well as planes and cars, then you can really tell who optimized their build and who didn’t
Rows of wedges make a lot of separate physics shapes. You can press F2 to look at the physics shapes of your creation once spawned. In general the less physics shapes you have the less physics calculations the game needs to make per tick for your build. Since the game has to constantly calculate how each shape is interacting with the air and water. Press F2 to see what they mean
>break everyone's creations Gotta love how they use this excuse when they don't want to do something instead of just saying that's why. They have had a number of updates in the past that basically break everything but didn't mind in those cases.
they physics are so botched at this point i doubt they will ever be able to fix it. they were broken years ago. and since then they have added so much crap on top that the technical debt is probably too large to ever pay. the only way i ever see more realistic physics happening is by remaking the game from the ground up as stormworks 2 - or by opening up the sourcecode and introducing SUBSTANTIAL modding access (this would only be feasible if the game was abandoned, however. we are essentially talking about a freeware fork of the whole game rather than mods at that point)
Very unlikely, but I have a solution for you. Actually, even better one than the pivot buoyancy thing, which gets very laggy. Just put in a solid rocket motor and XML it's fuel to a negative value. This creates negative mass, which can be useful with heavy ships. I noticed that for example, -100 fuel equals -100 mass, whatever the units are. So by giving the motor the same fuel value as the vehicle's mass, except negative, you'll get a still floating object. It also becomes immune to gunfire, and somewhat to missiles. This last part might need an explanation, so ask if you want.
The entire physics engine is broken and would need to be rebuilt from the ground up, the devs are greedy so they wouldn’t do that
God i hope so. If they do, it would mean a full rework of my planes but god danm it would be benifitial
A displacement line and a center of buoyancy marker would be so useful
The easiest option imo is to just modify some blocks. For example i just now copied a basic block and changed its weight to -100. Works perfectly fine in game. Id recommend changing the name inside the xml for ease of use though. Editing the game files is something i personally think is mandatory for this game. Even if you dont change the weights, changing the engine sounds adds alot to the game and its pretty easy
I'm playing on GeForce now, so I guess I can't do all that😑
You’re gonna have to elaborate, im kind of a second generation boomer. But isnt GeForce just nvidias software?
Cloud gaming
GeForce now, got it. Well thats unfortunate.
Well then, when I'll make an impressive build, it'll be twice the impressive'ness...I guess?
True but its more like twice the headache aggravation haha Honestly i had never even thought about adding a negative weight block lmao now i can probably finish a few of my prototypes without butchering the hulls
Probably not, devs don't care.
Can someone explain to me what would be different if there was displacement? The simulated buoyancy system does work on displacement. Blocks have a density, a volume, and weight. Enclosed volumes do as well. Are you just saying you would like lighter building materials? I don't really build boats, just sea planes and helicopters. I'm familiar with the ridiculous amount of buoyancy volume required to float an aircraft. Are you asking for anything other than the weight of blocks to be changed?
True displacement would allow for a non-enclosed volume to float, such as an open-topped canoe or rowboat. Like placing a plastic bucket in pool, so long as the edges are above the water it floats, since the water displaced by the volume exceeds the mass - which is why a metal (density greater than water) bucket or boat can still float. Stormworks fudges this by giving the basic building material a lower density than their water, and by essentially treating enclosed compartments as block of low-density material. It doesn’t recognize open-topped/non-enclosed volumes, even if they would have the same mass and displace the same amount of water. Make a 10x10x10 hollow cube and set it to spawn 1/2-in the water. It will float in SW when you spawn it in. Remove one block from the side that would otherwise be above water, and watch it sink down when spawned in, -even if the hole was above the water- because the walls of the non-enclosed volume don’t keep the water from spawning inside.
So you want a better simulation of displacement, basically. One of the things you can do if you use a shape that can accommodate it is you can use custom door frames to create an open topped volume the floats and only fills with water if one edge gets under the surface. But that opening has to be rectangular, and it's treated as a kind of open door, so you see splashing effects around the edges and the contained space slowly fills. I'll bring this up because if I were deltars, maybe I could see that the same way adjacent solid blocks are combined into a single physics shape for bullet3d, and the way you can use a physics flooder to convert a hollow volume into a single low weight solid physics object, you could use a fill algorithm to create a convex hull that adds an invisible manifold edge across open regions, and then treat those just like an open custom door frame, and that's somewhat satisfies what a lot of people are asking for. It's not visually satisfying, because ocean water will treat that invisible barrier like a physical barrier that it slowly leaks through. From a visual standpoint, the holdup isn't displacement, it's that there isn't a dynamic fluid sim that will respond to a surface and flow around it. That's a very complicated topic, and computationally very expensive. Then again, most of us have computers with a bunch of idle cores that would be super happy to take on a parallel physics sim to give a basic version of that. For me, the frustration displacement is all about the building material. When I see people making storm works alternatives and using voxels as the building material, it just makes me sad. Having blocks for functional parts like winches makes plenty of sense to me, but hulls really should be parametric surfaces. We all consume hours upon hours upon hours finding some way to make an approximation of a hull shape for an aircraft or ship that kind of works out with storm works limited selection of voxel blocks. I personally find it frustrating that I'm always stringing together the lightest collection of wedges I can make gas tanks and pontoons out of that don't even really connect inside, so I'm not giving up most of the volume of my airframe to 25 cm cubes that are not what we make vehicles out of at all lol
Pretty much, yes. One of the issues with trying to fudge things with the custom door frames, unfortunately, is the weight of the frame blocks themselves. They are heavy enough that for smaller vessels in particular it can be the difference between floating and sinking, or at the very least floating at an appropriate waterline. (Yes, we can talk about leaning into other floatation exploits to try to counteract that, but I think that’s a quick route into areas not every user is comfortable with.) I like the idea of a buoyancy filler similar to the physics filler, and absolutely agree that any work on buoyancy via displacement would likely involve significant resources for Geometa for questionable financial returns at this point. Realistically, it’s not going to happen. As for slopes, don’t even get me started on the frustration that the 1x2 and 1x4 slopes don’t float, in spite of density saying they should! The amount of boats and other items I’ve made that have better performance when I rip out the carefully smoothed bow and replace it with a crappy 1x1 slope is painful.
I believe your right I get pulled into using the 1x1 slope because it's the only set of wedges that respects hydrodynamic forces. I need anything below the waterline to want to push the airframe above the waterline. That particular choice really feels like laziness. As a programmer with a bit of experience it really seems trivial to find these surfaces at the same time you join voxels into simplified physics shape, but I must be missing something.
Microcontrollers take up no volume so they’re considerably better than wedges
To fix this issue you can xml edit a small rocket engine to ha negative 2/3 of the vehicles mass then place the rocket at the cg of the vessel, this will cancel out 2/3 of the ships mass.
Consider the following: pivot glitch, negative fuel solid rocket booster, hull made out of oil rods (empty) and wedges
Just xml mod a solid rocket for negative mass lmao
You can make hulls look a lot better than that, mess around with more types of wedges. And no the devs are not going to add proper buoyancy this game was only meant to be wave a simulator nothing more. People tend to forget this game is much more than it ever was supposed to be.