SimplePlanes 2 News

[p]The SimplePlanes Archipelago has a number of major locations to visit, each of them packed with way more love, detail, and interactivity than any of the locations in SimplePlanes 1 have. These are created by various people in the team, but for right now we’re going to focus on what Kevin and Pedro have been working on. We’ll start with one of Kevin’s brainchildren:[/p][p][/p][p]Located on the coast of New Yoke Island, Cochran Airport is probably the first place you’ll be greeted with when you play the game for the first time. I asked Kevin to provide some insight into the creative vision behind it, so I’m gonna take a moment to quote him here:[/p][p][/p][p]“Cochran was one of our largest and most ambitious airport projects. Inspired by the sleek, futuristic design of Shanghai Pudong International Airport, Cochran Airport blends realism with some unique gameplay twists—including destructible buildings and A380-friendly infrastructure.”[/p][p][/p][p]Cochran represents the very modern design language of New Yoke Island, with the futuristic-looking wavey roof on the terminal (lovingly borrowed from Pudong Airport), the sprawling layout that’s been hyper-optimized for the heaviest of air traffic, and more.[/p][p][/p][p]A major design goal here was to be able to accommodate the largest passenger aircraft the real world has to offer: the Airbus A380. This turned out to not be a trivial undertaking, with several parts of the airport needing to be redesigned early in development because they were simply too small for this behemoth of a plane. But it has been done, which means this airport is probably also perfectly equipped to handle whatever you can throw at it (provided it isn’t much more ludicrous in size than an A380).[/p][p][/p][p]Beyond that, Cochran has a number of fun playspaces including plenty of hangars (big and small, complete with animated doors), a fire station you can hang out inside of, and an oversized parking lot with a multi-story parking garage! We set out to make a believable space that also doesn’t compromise on fun gameplay opportunities, and we believe we’ve achieved that.[/p][hr][/hr][p]Sitting on the opposite side of the archipelago to Cochran by a little forest on Vetusta Island, Shepard Airport is another of Kevin's creations. As with Cochran, I'll quote Kevin here:[/p][p][/p][p]“Shepard Airport, our love letter to the mid-century charm of Amon Carter Field (now part of Dallas/Fort Worth International). Unlike Cochran's sprawling modern hubs, Shepard is a compact, retro-inspired airport that captures the spirit of aviation’s golden era of prop liners and early jets. Before DFW existed, Amon Carter Field (later renamed Greater Southwest International) was Fort Worth’s premier airport, opening in 1953 with a sleek, Space Age-inspired terminal.[/p][p][/p][p]In contrast to Cochran, our goal with Shepard was to create a nostalgic space that still functioned as an airport. When you visit, you'll soon notice through its architecture that it seems to be stuck in a different era. Shepard's neon signage, glass walls, distinct mixture of rectangular and curved shapes, and beige colouring define its aesthetic to create a cozy symbol of the past.[/p][p][/p][p]Functionally, you will find Shepard to not be as versatile as Cochran. Being designed for the propeller airliners and early jet airliners of the 1950's and early 1960's, its relatively narrow taxiways, smaller hangars, singular main runway (with a smaller crosswind runway too), and lack of Cochran's huge concourses make it impractical for anything much larger than an A320. This more compact layout lends Shepard its own charm though. Fun things to do besides flying include hanging out in the old-timey hangars with your friends, or if you're feeling confident about your skill behind a wheel you can try and drive fast through the little support beams holding up the big hallways sticking out of the terminal.[/p][p][/p][p]Shepard is a labour of love to a forgotten chapter in aviation history, one with a lot of wonder to it that we wanted to give the love and respect it deserves.[/p][p][/p][hr][/hr][p]Airports aren’t the only major locations of interest in the archipelago. After all, if you’re taking a flight to a regional airport you’re probably going there for a reason. Follow the main road south from Shepard Airport and you’ll find yourself in…[/p][p][/p][p]Those of you who’ve played Juno: New Origins after its 1.0 release may be familiar with Juno Village, a quaint little village high in the mountains. This was our first ever foray into making an actual settlement in one of our games rather than just strictly functional spaces like airports or aircraft carriers. Now take Juno Village, scale it up by about an order of magnitude, and you have Vetusta City :)[/p][p][/p][p]With a total area of approximately 1.5 square kilometers and over 1000 buildings (each of them manually placed), Vetusta is our first ever full-fledged city. At its longest axis, the city spans 2.5 kilometers in length, full of roads, alleys, and buildings. It’s a really fun and atmospheric space that helps the world feel truly alive.[/p][p][/p][p]Some of you may have already noticed that Cochran Airport and Shepard Airport are named after significant figures in aviation history that each pushed the boundaries of what was possible in their time: Jacqueline Cochran, the first woman to break the sound barrier; and Alan Shepard, the first American to go to space. Our islands, too, have meaning to their names. They represent the cultural divide between them, with one embracing tradition and the other looking to modernity.[/p][p][/p][p]Vetusta Island, and by extension Vetusta City, represents the former of those two; Vetusta is an archaic Spanish word for “very old”, with the city’s design reflecting that. Set at the foot of a castle, Vetusta City takes heavy inspiration from those old European cities that ooze with centuries of history, bringing elements of the past with them everywhere rather than abandoning them. I’m curious: what do you imagine the history of this city being like?[/p][p][/p][hr][/hr][p]In order to make a city that meets our goals for scale, visuals, and performance, we had to step back and think outside the box a little.[/p][p][/p][p]Buildings with a lot of detail look good, but they're computationally expensive to render which means if you have a lot of them you'll leave a large dent in the player's framerate, which goes against our goal of making a game that can be played on relatively modest hardware. On the other hand, low detail buildings impact framerates much less which means you can use more of them, but they have the drawback of being low detail so they may not feel very immersive[/p][p].[/p][p]Our approach for SimplePlanes 2 is much closer to the low detail end, but we've come up with some tricks to keep things looking believable while maximizing performance.[/p][p][/p][p]Our city buildings are procedurally generated to allow for easy setup and control when we're placing them down. They use very simple geometry to save performance; to achieve the appearance of higher detail we cheat by using some fun tricks with shaders and textures. Building colours get randomized based on where they are so you're not always looking at identical ones, individual windows have their lights turn on and off based on the time of day and whether they're facing the sun, and more.[/p][p][/p][p][/p][p]For the textures, we've been working with an Argentinian woman named Sol (fun fact, we've worked with her before — if you listen closely, you may hear her in Juno: New Origins). These textures utilize normal mapping and physically based rendering (PBR) techniques to achieve a sense of depth and higher detail, despite the buildings being extremely simplistic behind the scenes. This allows each building to punch above its weight a bit in terms of detail vs performance cost, thus allowing us to make a nice looking city without sacrificing too many of your precious frames.[/p][p][/p][hr][/hr][p]Like many of its real-world inspirations, at the heart of Vetusta City lies a large medieval-style castle set atop a hill. Our primary source of inspiration for the design of Vetusta Castle was the numerous medieval castles scattered throughout France, with their highly functional yet beautiful gothic designs that are so iconic they inspired an entire genre of fiction.[/p][p][/p][p][/p][p]Our castle is made up of numerous modular sections we created, allowing us to streamline the creation of castles and forts with a mix and match system we can bend to our will. Gatehouses, towers of multiple shapes and sizes, destructible bridges, and more are all in our little box of castle-flavoured goodies.[/p][p][/p][p]Vetusta Castle itself is a sprawling complex with multiple large buildings, split by a river cutting through the hill and meeting with the sea. Thick stone walls adorned with guard towers protect much of the castle from would-be invaders, the difficult terrain surrounding it serving as an additional line of defense. Large bridges connect the buildings across the river, conveniently being wide enough for you to sneak a vehicle onto. This castle is a lovingly created space designed to enhance the game’s atmosphere and create fun gameplay opportunities.[/p][p][/p][hr][/hr][p]If you can believe it, we still have more of the map to show off on a later date! If you like what you're seeing, please consider wishlisting the game! If you'd like to see bits of these blogs early, consider joining our Discord Server![/p]

[p]This latest dev blog is all about blowing stuff up! We're doing a lot to improve improve both the visual and gameplay experience surrounding this, so let's start off with the basics:[/p][p][/p][p]No matter what you’re doing in a game like SimplePlanes 2, chances are explosions will play a role whether you like it or not. With this in mind, when making SP2 we’ve taken special care to completely overhaul the explosion visuals to make them the best they’ve been in any of our games by adding new procedurally generated 3D effects, replacing the previous reliance on 2D sprites.[/p][p][/p][p]Explosions are a deceptively challenging thing to get looking right in video games. Most games opt for a combination of sprites and particle effects; this generally looks perfectly fine and I bet many of you never even noticed that the explosions in a lot of your favourite 3D games are probably mostly 2D. But for our uses this approach leaves a bit to be desired. First, transparent sprites have an annoying tendency to render in front of things like fog and clouds which ruins your sense of depth if there happens to be a cloud between you and an explosion. Second, they aren’t all that versatile; in a game like this you’re going to have a lot of possible explosion scales and angles to look at them from, not to mention the ability to slow down time and pause the game, all of which makes sprites pretty obvious and not great looking.[/p][p][/p][p]So in SP2 we’re taking a different approach. Using a procedurally generated mesh-based effect, we can have 3D explosion effects that can dynamically change in shape and size depending on the power of the explosion, while also looking perfectly fine if you look at it in slow motion. A weak explosion will create a relatively unremarkable fireball and a puff of smoke whereas a very strong one may make a big mushroom cloud that scatters debris everywhere, sending a frightening message to anyone on the same island as you.[/p][p][/p][p]As a fun bonus, these explosions also create a brief dynamic light source around them, making evening operations a spectacle all of their own as you light up the night. This is a little detail that I personally appreciate when I see other games doing it, and I think it adds a lot here.[/p][p][/p][p][/p][p][/p][p][/p][p]An important goal of SP2 is not just to give you an improved experience with the things you already know from the original SimplePlanes, but also to give you an expanded sandbox to play with. To that end, I’d like to introduce you to one of the brand new parts coming to the game: the Targeting Pod.[/p][p][/p][p]Targeting pods are a cornerstone of modern aerial combat and reconnaissance, allowing you to guide laser-guided munitions to their targets, gaze upon your friends from afar, or do both of those things at the same time and blow up your “friends”. Laser-guided weapons are great for stationary targets on the ground like buildings or anti-air emplacements, but beware that if you want to destroy a moving target there is nothing to hold your hand like with traditional guided weaponry – you will have to rely on your own skills to predict your target’s movement and score a hit.[/p][p][/p][p]To use a targeting pod, power it on, switch to Air To Ground mode, and drag the reticle to the spot you want to target (you can also slew it around using the IJKL keys on your keyboard). The little camera in the targeting pod will automatically orient itself to the target position as you move around, and laser-guided weapons you deploy will immediately home in on that spot. It doesn’t do all the work for you though, you will still have to take care not to fly in such a way that your aircraft blocks the pod’s view to the target, and make sure you’re close enough to the target for a bomb to actually hit.[/p][p][/p][p]But you might be thinking, “how does this let me spy on my friends?” – that’s where another new part we’re adding comes in: the Multi-Function Display.[/p][p][/p][p]The Multi-Function Display, or MFD, is a screen that lets you look at a real-time feed of what your targeting pod is looking at, with zoom capabilities that let you get a clear image of a location from very far away.[/p][p][/p][p]But that’s not all it does. In reality, the MFD is an all-in-one control panel that out of the box will let you monitor your aircraft’s telemetry, weapon status, and more, navigable through a bunch of buttons on the side.[/p][p][/p][p][/p][p][/p][p][/p][p][/p][p]The Targeting Pod isn’t the only new part we have for you in the “making things go boom” department. Andrew’s son has been interning with us to bring something to the game that I’m really excited to share:[/p][p][/p][p]In SP2, you will have access to a highly customizable procedural missile that comes with a number of settings that allow you to fine tune its functionality and appearance.[/p][p][/p][p][/p]

• [p]Increasing its size will give it more fuel and a bigger boom, but will result in a heavier and less maneuverable missile that you can’t carry as many of.[/p]
• [p]Adding fins will increase its turn rate, and make it look pretty cool.[/p]
• [p]Increasing the burn time will give it more range, but less acceleration, meaning it will be less useful for short range encounters.[/p]
• [p]Increasing the seeker field of view will widen the “cone” at which you can obtain a lock, but will effectively reduce the distance the missile can see which means a shorter lock on range.[/p]

[p]Those are just some of the basics, though. We’ve also got multiple different guidance systems you can choose from to ensure the missile knows where it is at all times, each with their own strengths and weaknesses:[/p]

• [p]Infrared[/p]
  • [p]These have the shortest range, but the fastest lock on time and are “fire and forget”. They home in on the target craft’s heat signature, with propellers and rotors producing the weakest heat signature and jet engines producing the strongest.[/p]
  • [p]Because their lock on method is passive, the target of one of these missiles will not be able to tell they’re being locked on to. If you believe you are in imminent danger from an IR missile, you may want to throttle down to reduce your heat signature and periodically deploy flares to confuse the missile.[/p]
  • [p][/p]

[p][/p]

• [p]Semi-Active Radar[/p]
  • [p]These have longer range than IR missiles, but a longer lock on time. They use the radar built in to your plane, and as such they require the user to maintain a lock until the missile hits its target in order to be effective.[/p]
  • [p]Unlike IR missiles, a lock on also sends the target a warning, which gives them an opportunity to react. If you’re being locked by one of these, deploy chaff and try to put a solid barrier in between yourself and the enemy craft to break line of sight.[/p]
  • [p][/p]
• [p]Active Radar [/p]
  • [p]These have the longest range and the longest lock on time. Unlike their semi-active counterparts, these missiles use their own built-in radar to track targets, which makes them a very scary fire and forget weapon. But that extra radar equipment makes them the heaviest of the bunch, meaning you’ll need a bigger and heftier missile to make the most out of them.[/p]
  • [p]Countering one of these is similar to the semi-active type, but with the added complication of needing to break line of sight with the missile itself, not the craft that launched it.[/p]
  • [p][/p]
• [p]Laser [/p]
  • [p]These track a laser emitted from a targeting pod.[/p]
  • [p]If you’re in a ground vehicle and in danger of a laser-guided weapon from an approaching aircraft, try to break line of sight with it using buildings or terrain.[/p]
  • [p][/p]

[p][/p][p]That is a handful, but I’m not quite done yet. There’s also a few different engine types to play around with:[/p]

• [p]Solid[/p]
  • [p]This uses a simple solid rocket motor to propel the missile.[/p]
• [p]Thrust Vectoring[/p]
  • [p]Similar to Solid, but can gimbal to improve the missile’s maneuverability. This comes at a weight cost, though.[/p]
• [p]Jet Engine[/p]
  • [p]Replaces the rocket engine with a jet engine. This drastically increases the missile’s burn time which increases its range, but equally it reduces its acceleration and top speed. This makes it ideal for long range cruise missiles.[/p]

[p]Okay, now I’m done. These missiles will add a ton of depth to this game’s combat sandbox, which previously left a lot to be desired. I hope you like them :)[/p][p][/p][p][/p][p]If you like what you see, please consider wishlisting the game! If you'd like to see bits of these posts early, consider joining our Discord Server![/p]

[p]As many of you are keenly aware, a lot of vehicles aren’t just solid-colour smooth metal or plastic. Some have camouflage, liveries, or just subtle detailing. That’s where our new texturing system comes in.[/p][p]In SimplePlanes 2’s paint tool you can now give each paint slot a wide variety of textures, ranging from camouflage to gradients and animal patterns. In SP2 you can choose between adding a “flat” texture and a “wrapped” texture to your paint. A flat texture is projected onto your craft from a single direction, which you can change the rotation of. A wrapped texture uses triplanar mapping, which you may recall from our previous blog about environments. Both options have their own strengths and weaknesses, with wrapped coming in particularly handy in a number of cases where a flat texture doesn’t produce the expected look on certain geometry.[/p][p]Once you select a texture, you can now mess around with it to suit your needs. You can set a different colour for each different part of the texture (different parts of a camo pattern, for instance), and you can even override the materials on each of them so you can have one part of your texture be shinier or flatter than another. All of this taking up only one paint slot![/p][p]You also have a bunch of settings that will allow you to change the size, rotation, and offset of your texture, allowing you to fine tune it to fit whatever it is you’re going for.[/p][p]This texturing system, in combination with the new paint tools we talked about before, opens the door for a lot more artistry than in our other games and it’s a ton of fun to mess around with![/p][p][/p][p][/p][p][/p][p][/p][p][/p][p][/p][p]While being able to paint your craft with textures is great and all, there’s a lot it doesn’t let you do if you want to obsess over finer details. To fix this, we’ve added a brand new customizable Decal part that lets you pick from a large number of different shapes and designs and place them anywhere on your craft, automatically conforming to its surface.[/p][p]With decals, you can easily make roundels, liveries, or even dirt and grime! Countershading (brighter colours on the underside of a craft) and other similar concepts should also be a breeze now. You can adjust each decal’s colour, opacity, width, height, rotation, and depth to fine tune exactly how you want it to appear on your craft. You can also change the render priority for layering multiple decals on top of one another, and you can add some tiling similarly to the paint textures.[/p][p]These decals do have a performance cost especially if you use a lot of them, but they should look and perform much better than fuselage art or label images while being much easier to work with. You can also import custom images as decals by dragging and dropping them into a folder and then updating an accompanying XML file, but do note that custom decals will only work for yourself and cannot be uploaded with the craft, nor will they be visible to other players in multiplayer unless the other players also have that decal.[/p][p]In addition to image decals, we’ve also added a Text Decal part that works the same way as an image decal but for typing text into, allowing you to finally have text that truly conforms to your craft the way you want it to![/p][p]Our playtesters have been having a field day with the decals and I’m confident you will too![/p][p][/p][carousel][/carousel][p][/p][p]If you like what you see, please consider wishlisting the game, and if you want to see these showcases early consider joining our Discord Server![/p]

[p]In the last showcase, which you can find here if you missed it, we talked about what we're doing to make the UI in SimplePlanes 2 better than ever.[/p][p]But we’ve yapped long enough about the map and UI for now; this is of course a game all about building aircraft, and many of you at this point are no doubt wondering what exactly we’ve done to build on the experience SimplePlanes and Juno: New Origins gave you. Well, wonder no longer, for I present to you…[/p][h3][/h3][h2]The Fully Procedural Curvy Wings of Your Dreams[/h2][p][/p][p]That is a lot of words. What do they mean? Well, in essence, it means Nicky has been spending nearly five whole years working to give you an insanely customizable new wing part that you can shape to your heart’s content, right down to the NACA airfoil shape if you want. There is no base 3D model to start with here like the old wings had, they are created completely on the fly using magic (procedural generation), and they look like actual wings instead of the boxes from before (sidenote, those old wings are still in the game unchanged and will be what SimplePlanes 1 crafts loaded into SimplePlanes 2 use, but they’ll be inaccessible from the parts list). These wings are such a huge addition that we’ll have multiple showcases dedicated solely to them, so keep an eye out for those! Now let’s get the introduction out of the way and show you what all this actually lets you do.[/p][p][/p][p]On a basic level, changing the shape of your wing works much the same way as it did before: you have a 3D gizmo that you can click and drag to manipulate different parts of the wing. But in addition to that we’ve given you a panel that lets you fine tune the shape using numbers, similar to the fuselage editor. I know I said we were done yapping about the UI for now, but I lied. Sorry.[/p][p][/p][p]When editing your wing, you’ll notice an “Add Section” button. Click on that and another section will be added to the end of your wing, which you can change the shape and airfoil of (more on airfoils in a moment) independently of the previous section, and you can bend one section to add a curve leading to the next section for dihedral wings or whatever other diabolical shapes you can come up with. The possibilities of this segment system are endless – you can have varying thickness on different parts of the wing, leading edge extensions, and all sorts of complex shapes, all as a single part. No inflating the part count to get a cool wing shape; whatever you end up doing here is just one singular part. [/p][p][/p][p][/p][p]Now, as mentioned before, you can also customize the airfoil shape. The same basic symmetric, semi-symmetric, and flat bottom options from before are still here, but for you more advanced players we’ve added a NACA 4-digit setting, allowing you to play around with your wing’s camber height, camber offset, and thickness, all majorly affecting your wing’s flight characteristics. For instance, a thin airfoil will net you less drag but it’ll be brutal in a stall, with the opposite being true for a thicker airfoil. You can set different airfoil shapes per wing section, with the game attempting to smoothly interpolate from one shape to the other. This adds a lot of depth to how you set up your aircraft, and we’re excited to get it into your hands.[/p][p][/p][p][/p][p]When it came to aerodynamic control of your craft, your options were pretty limited in SP1. You pretty much had to either use a boring box built into the wing, or an all-moving wing using a rotator. For SP2, we’ve completely overhauled the way control surfaces work, adding them as independent parts in the parts list that you can freely add to your wing. These will seamlessly match the geometry of the wing and can be shaped more easily than before since they’re independent parts.[/p][p][/p][p][/p][p]We’ve also added a number of new types of control surface! These each serve a unique function to manipulate the physics of your craft in different ways. More will likely be made over time, but as of this showcase you can expect:[/p][p][/p]

• [p]Standard Flap[/p]
  • [p]These are your typical control surfaces. You use these for pitch, roll, and yaw. Or for some other unorthodox purpose, I won’t judge[/p]
  • [p][/p]
• [p]Brake Flap[/p]
  • [p]These serve the same function as the Standard Flap, but they can split in two to serve as airbrakes when needed. Useful for slowing down, or as yaw control on a tailless aircraft if you’re feeling experimental.[/p]
  • [p][/p]
• [p]Fowler Flap[/p]
  • [p]These slide backwards (and downwards if you give enough input) to increase the surface area of your wing, thereby granting you extra lift. Essential for takeoff and landing on most aircraft.[/p]
  • [p][/p]
• [p]Slat[/p]
  • [p]These do a very similar thing to the Fowler Flap, but the key difference is they are attached to the leading edge (the front) of your wing instead of the trailing edge (the rear).[/p]
  • [p][/p]
  [p][/p]

[p][/p][p]These have been highly requested features for a long time, and we hope they are to your liking :) [/p][p][/p][p][/p][p]Wings are cool and all, but unless you’re making a flying wing you generally need something to actually put them on. That’s where the other big thing Nicky has been working on comes in:[/p][p][/p][p][/p][p]While there is lots of evidence to prove that the fuselages in SP1 are plenty capable, they do still leave a bit to be desired in terms of functionality, ease of use (especially for new players), and not being a headache for developers to work with. So, for SP2, we’re giving you a brand new fuselage part from scratch that is capable of everything the original is but with loads of new features and optimizations.[/p][p]Among these new features are new ways to alter the shape of a fuselage. To start off simple, we’ve brought in the fine corner radius control from Juno. This means that rather than having the four basic corner options you’re used to, you can just use a slider to make the corners however you want them. On a more technical note we’ve also optimized this so that the level of detail is now dynamic, allowing us to dynamically give curved fuselages more detail and square fuselages less detail, rather than every shape having the same number of vertices like before.[/p][p][/p][p][/p][p]But that’s not all! What about the space between the corners? We’ve given those some love too: you can now give each edge a bit of curvature, which will give that edge an inflated shape. This is invaluable for easy replication of a number of real aircraft cross sections, which leads nicely into our next big feature.[/p][p]You now have a trapezoid slider! This lets you transform the cross section of your fuselage from a rectangle into a trapezoidal shape (or just a triangle if you go extreme enough), and works alongside the edge curve feature to give you far more control over the cross sectional shape of a fuselage than we’ve ever given you before, and I’m certain it’s going to lead to some insane creations once you get your hands on it.[/p][p][/p][p][/p][p]Moving on from shapes, we’ve also completely overhauled the colliders (aka hitboxes). Colliders are now dynamically created based on the shape of your fuselages, which has a number of useful implications but perhaps most notably it means that hollow fuselages are actually hollow! You can move things through them! You can walk through them! You can… I don’t know what else to put here but whatever you’re thinking it’s probably possible now! This is a very exciting change all on its own and I look forward to seeing what you do with it.[/p][p][/p][p][/p][p]And finally, there are now more paint trims on the fuselage. In addition to painting the exterior like you’re used to, at long last you can now separately paint the interior and both ends.[/p][p][/p][p][/p][p]And this is all just the beginning. We have a lot of exciting plans in the pipeline for these fuselages, but we aren’t ready to talk about those just yet so keep an eye out for more info in the coming months![/p][p][/p]

[p]Welcome to the second SimplePlanes 2 dev blog! If you missed the first one, you can check it out here – in it we showed off the new SimplePlanes archipelago and the tools we used to bring it to life.[/p][p][/p][p]With the Archipelago out of the way for now, though, let’s talk about another big undertaking we’re doing for SimplePlanes 2: the UI.[/p][p][/p][p]Andrew has been working very hard on a new XML-based UI system for SP2, called JUICY (Jundroo UI Controls and a Y for fun). This new system replaces the ancient, nigh-unusable mishmash of UI systems we were using in SimplePlanes 1 and allows us to work on the UI at a far greater pace than before, laying the groundwork for a whole host of improvements to the presentation and user experience.[/p][p][/p][p]Andrew has a lot to say about this, so I’m gonna let him take the reins for a moment:[/p][p][/p][p]"Our system is an XML based system that sits on top of Unity's UGUI, which is a pretty great system developed by Unity. Adding this XML layer gives us so much more flexibility and control over how things are styled. It's very heavily inspired by HTML and CSS if you're familiar with that.[/p][p][/p][p]Writing a new UI system from scratch took some time, but now that it's in place, it's making the development of new UIs so much faster. Need a new panel with some controls? BAM! Done before lunch. Need to tweak the style of all dialogs in the game? Already done before I could say (INSERT SOMETHING FUNNY).[/p][p][/p][p]One of my core objectives with SimplePlanes 2 is to make the game feel alive in every way. This includes the UI. Now nearly every interactable UI element on the screen responds to you. When you hover the mouse over a button, it swells up - YES CLICK ME! - when you click it, it smashes down before returning to its normal size. Panels, dialogs, lists, slide into place."[/p][p][/p][p]Something else this allows us to support is easy customization of the UI by the player through simple (or not so simple) XML edits, much like in Juno: New Origins. Some caution will need to be taken as the game’s code does reference certain bits by name, but overall it should be much easier for modders to change the UI, or for regular players to make small styling changes if they want to simply by going into their XML files.[/p][p][/p][carousel][/carousel][p][/p][h2]Layout[/h2][p][/p][p]Now that we’ve gone over the behind the scenes technical improvements for the UI, let’s talk about the actual layout.[/p][p][/p][p]One of our main goals with the designer in SP2 is to keep it familiar to old players while improving the user experience (UX) wherever possible. We’re taking a lot of learnings from Juno here – for that game’s designer we felt we had improved the UX a lot, but it had come at the cost of familiarity, and in many ways we also made it too complicated for new players to get a grasp on. In SP2 you should feel right at home as the layout is mostly the same as in SP1, with some options moved around into more intuitive places and many quality of life improvements, like the escape key no longer booting you to the title screen...[/p][p][/p][p]Next, the in-flight layout. This should feel very familiar as the fundamentals are unchanged, but open the menu and you’ll be met with a host of new options (same goes for the designer, actually, but moreso here) – most notably, you can now save and load crafts while in flight. Find a cool spot on the ground and want to switch to a car? Just load one from your saved crafts and it’s there, with no additional loading screen. I can’t tell you how much easier this makes exploration feel; moving somewhere to take a screenshot with a specific craft is a breeze now. We’ve also overhauled the Mouse As Joystick UI to be better looking and do a better job of indicating your inputs.[/p][p][/p][p]Aside from that, another big new thing here is the “BUILD” button. This sends you to the designer, but unlike SP1 or Juno it does not unload the flight scene, allowing you to quickly exit to the designer to make a quick change and then come back in exactly the same spot you were in before.[/p][p][/p][p]And finally, you can now access all of the game’s settings from anywhere – the title screen, the designer, or in-flight. I’ve always been perplexed about SP not allowing this, but you can do it now and it’s so much more convenient.[/p][p][/p][p]We want to make the UI in SP2 feel more alive than in our previous games. There’s a coherent design language throughout the entire game’s UI, full of little animations and sounds that give it some much-needed character. This results in a UI that I think feels much more polished than what we’ve done before and I’m excited for you all to get your hands on it.
[/p][carousel][/carousel][p]
[/p][h2]Designer Environments[/h2][p] [/p][p]In our previous games, players often wanted more customization for the designer itself. In Juno we allowed you to set a custom solid colour for the background, which was a step in the right direction but there was a lot more that could be done.

For SP2, that same background colour functionality is still present, but it comes alongside a bunch of other neat little settings you can change to make the designer look the way you want it to. Don’t want a solid colour void? We’ve got a number of more scenic backgrounds for you to choose from on a whim, with the lighting on your craft being updated to reflect the conditions of your chosen background.

Oh yeah that’s right, the designer has actual lighting now. Finally, you can properly gauge the shininess of your Tasteful™ metallic paint without leaving the designer, viewing it in all its glory. You can also change the angle of the overhead light as well as its brightness (useful if you’re working on brightly coloured parts and need to dim the lights a bit), and you can tweak the intensity of reflections if your craft is too shiny to work with.

Additionally, you can change from a few different platforms, including a dark square with a customizable glowing ring in it, the ol’ reliable SimplePlanes grey circle, or nothing at all.[/p][p][/p][p][/p][h2]Paint Tool Improvements[/h2][p][/p][p]The Paint Tool is one of the most important things at your disposal in the designer, and for SP2 we’ve made some major quality of life improvements that will make using it much faster and remove the guesswork.[/p][p][/p][p]To start, you’re no longer bound to either a basic set of colour options or hex codes – we’ve given you an actual colour wheel you can mess around with to your heart’s content. We added this later on in the development of Juno and it really made messing with your craft’s colours a lot more convenient and fun, so I’m excited to get it into your hands as well.[/p][p][/p][p]Next, there is now an auto-target option, which will automatically paint the correct trim on a part according to where your cursor is. This speeds things up a lot, eliminating the need to guess or memorize the correct trim when painting your craft.[/p][p][/p][p]And finally, hovering your mouse over a part with the paint tool open previews the paint before you apply it! So not only can you automatically select the right trim, you can actually see which one you’re about to paint![/p][p][/p][p]All of these things combine to make for a much more polished-feeling paint tool that is easier to use than before, making painting your craft something to really look forward to.[/p][p][/p][p][/p][h2]Part Search Panel[/h2][p][/p][p]If you make crafts with a lot of parts and/or mechanical complexity, chances are you’ve had to struggle with finding specific parts when you need them. For SP2, we’re adding a new Search Parts panel, which will open a list of all the parts in your craft for you to select and do various other things.[/p][p][/p][p]Once again, those of you who’ve played Juno will be familiar with this menu, but compared to Juno we’ve made a number of improvements to make it faster.[/p][p][/p][p]In the Search panel, you can search parts by their part ID or their name. To facilitate the latter, we’ve added the ability to rename parts to whatever you want. You can do this either in a given part’s properties menu, or by clicking the rename button in the search panel. Renaming parts helps you keep track of what you’re doing and it helps curious players understand what all the doodads in your craft are for, so we encourage you to do it as much as possible![/p][p][/p][p]From here you can also hide individual parts by clicking the eye button, and you can simply click on them to select them in the same way clicking on them normally does, allowing you to quickly tweak any part in your craft without actually having to physically find it like you did before. On the bottom of the panel is all of the normal part hiding functionality you’re used to from SP1, but labeled using words instead of icons to be more intuitive than before.[/p][p][/p][p]With this new tool, managing all the little bits and pieces of your craft is so much easier than before and I hope you’ll find it to be a welcome addition to the designer.[/p][p][/p]