SimplePlanes 2 News

[p][/p][p]The Demo is just around the corner! This will be the final dev blog before the demo goes live on October 27. This blog will be going over the stock crafts you'll be playing with, as well as some performance and quality of life changes.[/p][hr][/hr][p]The SimplePlanes 2 Flight Demo contains a variety of brand new stock crafts using the new goodies the game has to offer, with many more planned for the full release and potentially beyond.[/p][p][/p][p]These stock crafts have been lovingly made by a bunch of our playtesters, all under the management of Cody Cain, AKA Mod.[/p][p][/p][p]The selection of crafts in the Flight Demo includes:[/p]

• [p]8 Airplanes[/p]
• [p]4 Cars[/p]
• [p]3 Helicopters[/p]

[p]These crafts are made by BaconAircraft, BaconEggs, Cody himself, crazyplaness, DeezDucks, dots, FairFireFlight, HuskyDynamics, MisterT, and ShizzleStyx, with even more people making some of the planned crafts for the release version. Each craft is made with a lot of care and love, with an occasional easter egg thrown around here and there reflecting the creator’s personal interests.[/p][p][/p][p]Before we show you the new crafts, here’s a brief introduction from Cody:[/p]

[p]Hey y'all, I'm Cody otherwise known around the SP and JNO communities as "Mod" - neat nickname, I know. Anyways, I've been behind the scenes working together with Jundroo and the Playtesters as a craft manager/liason to build some of the coolest, most fun, and easiest to use stock craft you've ever put your hands on. It's been a journey from the start and I could not have done any of this without the playtesters' eagerness to build and help each other with their impressive builds using all the new features that SP2 brings to the table over SP1.[/p][p][/p][p]Less talk from me, here are a few images I've taken of some of the stock craft that will be available in the SP2 DEMO![/p][p][/p][p][/p]

[p]Going into each individual craft in the demo via text would be exhausting and not very entertaining, so please check out this overview video by Deep Space Industries, a long time friend of the dev team. They’ve put a lot of effort into this video and it contains nearly 14 whole minutes of gameplay going over each craft in the demo, so it’s worth checking out![/p][p][dynamiclink][/dynamiclink][/p][hr][/hr][p]In our previous games, when you wanted to load a craft or make adjustments to your current one you had to back out of the flight scene and into the designer, having to reload the whole flight scene every time when you’re ready to use the new or updated craft.[/p][p][/p][p]In SimplePlanes 1 this wasn’t a huge issue on most modern hardware because there wasn’t much in the flight scene that needed to be loaded anyway so the load times were very quick, but it became significantly more annoying with Juno: New Origins, and in SP2 it would be worse not just because we have a lot more stuff to load than in SP1, but because we support multiplayer now which creates a whole other host of problems there.[/p][p][/p][p]So in SP2 we thought, “what if you could just load crafts or go back to the designer without unloading the flight scene?”. And so we put our finest coding wizards on the task, and now you can save, load, and download crafts without even having to go back to the designer, and if you do go back to the designer it won’t unload the flight scene, keeping load times pretty much non-existent when you’re moving back and forth between designing and flying. This solves every problem with the previous approach, and makes things much more convenient for the player. Here’s what Andrew has to say about it:[/p][p][/p]

[p]Multiplayer really forced us to redesign how the flight scene works. We can't have players exiting the flight scene every time they want to change their craft or make a tweak because they'd lose all their state in flight. This was especially problematic for the server as that would kill the server and boot all the players. This was actually the primary reason. Now, it's hard to imagine not being able to swap your craft, download something from the website, or make a change to your craft without losing your progress. Supporting multiplayer forced us to solve this problem and it ended up making the game so much more enjoyable in singleplayer as well.[/p]

[p][/p][hr][/hr][p]SP2 is quite a pretty game in comparison to its predecessor, and with that comes extra demand on hardware. Compared to SP1, SP2 on PC now requires a dedicated graphics card with at least 3 GB of VRAM. You may be able to get away with going below the minimum requirements depending on your hardware (and your standards), but if you don’t have enough VRAM in particular you might not have much luck.
[/p][p]Regardless, just because a game has higher system requirements than its predecessor doesn’t mean we shouldn’t strive to make it run as smoothly as possible on a wide range of hardware. So in SP2 we have a lot of graphical settings to let you sacrifice visual fidelity in favour of more frames per second. Trees can be reduced or removed, shadows can be disabled, terrain details can be reduced, and so on, helping to ensure the game can run nice and smooth even if you don’t have top of the line hardware.[/p][p][/p][p]Outside of just graphics, multiplayer has forced us to make a lot of optimizations to craft performance as well, as even a craft with a relatively modest part count can cause a hefty drop in performance if there’s seven other people using it at the same time. We will continue to make further improvements on this front over time, but right now you should already notice considerable performance improvements with high part count crafts. In one case, I tried out a 10,000 part craft with a performance cost of 25,000 and got 4 frames per second in SP1, but 20-25 in SP2. That’s 5x better performance! Your mileage may vary of course, but in general your monstrous crafts should run much better now (best not to bring them into multiplayer, though).[/p][p][/p][p]Additionally, the new parts in SimplePlanes 2 are more capable than the old ones, so you’ll be able to do more with less, meaning extra performance just from not having to use as many parts to make a detailed craft. Believe it or not, all of our new stock crafts use no more than 350 parts! Additionally, thanks to some wizardry by Nicky, the new wings and fuselages use a Unity feature called Burst to make them nice and optimized![/p][hr][/hr][p]And that does it! We'll see you in a few days for the demo. Don't forget to wishlist SimplePlanes 2 on Steam, and if you'd like to chat with people about the demo when it goes live, join our Discord server![/p]

[p]Welcome to Part 3 of our set of blogs showing off the new wings! This one goes into some more enhancements to visuals and physics, so let's get into it, starting with...[/p][p][/p][p]Er... propellers are technically wings, right? I know, put away your nerd emojis, I just had nowhere else to put this. So anyway...[/p][p][/p][p]When something like a propeller blade spins very fast, it creates a blur effect that is rather plainly called motion blur. Propellers had motion blur in SimplePlanes 1 but it was very basic, merely being a flat rotating texture. Because of that, they had various visual shortcomings, mainly that they were infinitely thin from the side and they didn’t really interact with the lighting in a convincing way.[/p][p][/p][p]So for SimplePlanes 2 we “borrowed” a technique Philip had previously developed for version 1.1 of Juno: New Origins for proper 3D motion blur on propellers, giving them actual depth, better lighting, and overall much better visual fidelity. Not only that, but the blur properly adapts to the current properties of your propeller like the shape, RPM, or pitch![/p][p]

GIF is a very limiting file format to work with; if you'd like to download a higher quality MP4 version of this, click on this text[/p][p]This effect looks much better than the old motion blur – so much better in fact that we’ve also applied it to helicopter rotors! Additionally, it holds up much better than before in slow motion or when paused, showing the blades partially blurred but not with the full intensity seen at regular speed.[/p][p] GIF is a very limiting file format to work with; if you'd like to download a higher quality MP4 version of these, click on this text[/p][p][/p][p]Propellers and rotors now also have new XML properties that let you customize parts of the motion blur’s behaviour, letting aesthetically-minded technical players get their hands dirty to make things look how they want if the default values aren’t cutting it.[/p][hr][/hr][p]In the Wings Part 2 dev blog, we went over some of the physics for the new wings in SP2. This section will elaborate a bit on one aspect of those: “spanwise flow”[/p][p][/p][p]In real life, wings produce different amounts of lift across different parts of the wingspan, with lift gradually being reduced towards the tip of the wing. This wasn’t modeled in SP1, meaning the whole wing produced the same amount of lift, which left a lot to be desired.[/p][p][/p][p]SP2 on the other hand has a whole spanwise flow model developed by Nicky through blood sweat and tears, simulating it and many of the resulting characteristics it gives to your wings but in a simplified enough manner that you don’t need a supercomputer to run it.[/p][p][/p][p]One of the biggest differences you’ll notice here is with stalling behaviour. For the uninitiated, stalling is essentially when the angle of attack of your wing (the angle of the front edge relative to the airflow) is so high that it can no longer effectively produce lift, making the aircraft drastically less controllable. In SP1 the whole wing would abruptly stall at once, but now in SP2 wings will gradually stall from the tip to the root, resulting in generally much more gentle and realistic stalls.[/p][p][/p][p]“Induced drag” is also modeled now, essentially being extra drag that comes as a direct result of the lift your wings are producing. More efficient wing shapes such as those with a large wingspan will have less induced drag than less efficient shapes, creating more of a need to balance your designs than SP1 had.[/p][p][/p][p]As a result of these new effects, delta wings (previously a notable victim of SP1’s wing physics) are back with a vengeance, now capable of reaching the high angles of attack they were always destined to; perhaps with a bit more proficiency than they realistically should unless we make the physics even more advanced later down the line, but for now their excessive performance makes for extra fun for the player.[/p][p][/p][p]As this is inherently an abstract force that is hard to observe, we’ve added a nifty visualizer to see the lift and drag forces coming from your wings. This was originally a developer-only visualizer used for debugging, but our playtesters saw usefulness in it so now you too can see a flurry of benevolent green lines coming out of your wings if you so choose.[/p][p] GIF is a very limiting file format to work with; if you'd like to download a higher quality MP4 version of this, click on this text[/p][p] GIF is a very limiting file format to work with; if you'd like to download a higher quality MP4 version of this, click on this text[/p][hr][/hr][p]You know those little trails you often see coming from the wings of all sorts of planes? Those have a name, they’re called wingtip vortices. They’ve been a fairly commonly requested visual effect for both SP1 and Juno for a long time, and at long last they’re made their way into SP2.[/p][p][/p][p]We could have simply hardcoded some basic logic that just makes a trail come from the tip of your wing and called it a day, but we didn’t do that. Using the spanwise flow model Nicky developed, we can have wingtip vortices that actually take the physical characteristics of your wing into account like the lift it’s generating, the distribution of that lift, the shape of the wing, and more.[/p][p][/p][p]For a slightly more complicated explanation, wingtip vortices are, as the name might suggest, a result of a fast-rotating vortex formed behind a wing. The precise reasoning for the formation of said vortex is… complicated aerodynamics stuff that’s beyond the scope of this post, but basically there’s a lot of weird airflow happening on the wing, with sideways airflow and pressure differences causing the air near the wingtip to rotate, which becomes the vortex. Normally these vortices are invisible as they’re just air, but certain conditions such as your altitude can contribute to making water droplets in the atmosphere condense or even freeze inside the vortex due to the low pressure, which creates a visible trail in a rather similar manner to the distinct funnel cloud seen on a tornado but on a much smaller scale.[/p][p][/p][p]For a much more complicated explanation, Nicky recommends NASA TM X-2516, a paper published by NASA in 1972 that proved vital in his research on how to get this stuff into the game. He also wanted me to tell you he’s jealous of their huge wind tunnel.
GIF is a very limiting file format to work with; if you'd like to download a higher quality MP4 version of this, click on this text [/p][hr][/hr][p]If you like what you're seeing, please consider wishlisting SimplePlanes 2 on Steam. If you'd like to see bits of these blogs early, consider joining our Discord Server![/p]

[p]As much as I love the music from SimplePlanes 1, it quickly got pretty repetitive in-game as there were only five songs and they played all the time, ultimately leading to many people just muting the music and listening to something else while they play.[/p][p][/p][p]So for SimplePlanes 2, we have a brand new in-game soundtrack comprising of fifteen songs, composed by a lovely duo called Fat Bard (who we worked with previously to make the music of Juno: New Origins). They’ve made music for tons of games over the years, and we’re really happy with what they made for SP2.[/p][p]To give you a taste of what you can expect, here’s a full song, titled “Speed for Speed”:
[/p][p][dynamiclink][/dynamiclink][/p][p]And while you listen, here’s an interview with Fat Bard![/p][p][/p]

• [p]How long have you been composing, and what other game soundtracks have you worked on?[/p]

  [p]We've been composing for about 14 years now in games, but we also wrote music well before that as songwriters for various bands we were in during childhood. We've worked on a huge variety of game soundtracks and it's hard to list them off. For more well known live service games, we've done various music packs for Smite, the hit 3rd person MOBA. Then in the AA space we've recently done work on Deadzone Rogue, a lovely looking sci-fi FPS. The indie space is where we do most of our soundtracks; such as Jet Lancer, Demon Turf/Demon Tides, Crashlands 1/2, Rugrats: Adventures in Gameland, of course SimpleRockets 2, and the upcoming Bubsy 4d.[/p]

• [p]What inspired the music for SimplePlanes 2?[/p]

  [p]Our inspiration for this soundtrack was in huge part 80's rock and electronic music. We wanted to create something that spanned the era, from ballads to electronic to hard hitting rockers. Having separate music for design and flight mode helped in molding this as well.[/p]

• [p]What tools, instruments, or techniques did you use to create the soundtrack?[/p]

  [p]We used our guitars of course, but primarily a lot of the sounds heard are from our computers. We have plenty of great drum and keyboard libraries to work from. A lot of our keyboard sounds come from the Korg M1.[/p]

• [p]Were there any unique challenges when composing for SimplePlanes 2 compared to past projects?[/p]

  [p]I think one main challenge was really honing in on that 80's sound, particularly in the guitar and drums. We're always striving for a high quality production sound, and when you're harkening to an older era you have to forgo that in order to get something that sounds authentic.[/p]

• [p]Which track is your favorite, and why?[/p]

  [p]Hard to pick! "Endless Journey" is probably a favorite, because it's a breezy rocker that feels great no matter what you're doing in game.[/p]

• [p]Aside from SimplePlanes 2 😆, which soundtrack has been your favorite to work on?[/p]

  [p]HMMMM now that is an even harder question! I think in the last few months our favorite has been Bubsy 4d. We rarely get to explore serious jazz/funk music, so it was a real treat to re-brand Bubsy with some slick music. His history is full of pretty lackluster music, so we really wanted to make some bangers on the new game.[/p]

• [p]Where can people find more of your work?[/p]

  [p]Folks can find our work on Spotify/Apple Music/iTunes/Bandcamp under "Fat Bard", and if you want to follow us we're "@fatbard.com" on BlueSky and "@fat_bard" on X.[/p]

  [p] [/p]

[hr][/hr][p]Rather than playing every song no matter what you’re doing like in SimplePlanes 1, parts of SimplePlanes 2’s music are dynamic and change depending on whether you’re chilling in the designer or blowing people up in flight.[/p][p][/p][p]Some of the songs are layered, so they’ll seamlessly transition from calmer to more intense when moving from the designer to flight, or vice-versa, which when combined with there being many more songs than before helps keep the music feel less static.[/p][p][/p][p]Describing this with words hardly does it any justice, so we’ve made a music video to show off how one of our songs adapts to your gameplay, titled Guided by Starlight:
[/p][p][dynamiclink][/dynamiclink][/p][p]The SP2 soundtrack will be available to purchase on Steam once the game comes out, so you’ll be able to listen to it all on your own time while supporting Fat Bard and the developers![/p][hr][/hr][p]If you like what you're seeing (or listening to, in this case), please consider wishlisting SimplePlanes 2 on Steam. If you'd like to see bits of these blogs early, consider joining our Discord Server![/p]

[p]As some of you may know, Steam Next Fest started yesterday, which is a week-long event Steam runs a few times a year where tons of game developers publish demos of their upcoming games. As you probably also know, the SimplePlanes 2 Demo isn’t a part of it. We would have loved to participate in this Next Fest, but the Flight Demo just wasn’t ready in time. However, though the demo isn’t ready right now, we promised it would be in October and we intend to keep that promise, so without further adieu, you’ll be able to play the demo on…[/p][p][/p][p]That’s just under two weeks from now! This demo will be available for a week, and as a reminder it will offer a limited part of the SimplePlanes 2 experience, with:[/p]

• [p]A “read-only” designer, where you can look around and load our new stock crafts or your old SimplePlanes 1 crafts and paint them, but can’t add or modify parts.[/p]
• [p]Driftwood Island, a small island east of the main isles densely packed with points of interest, including a race track. Attempting to venture too close to the main islands will result in your demise via missiles.[/p]
• [p]Numerous activities to play by yourself or with friends, including races, PvP deathmatches, and more.[/p]

[p][/p][p]To gain access to the demo as soon as it’s available, head on over to our Steam page, find the “Join the SimplePlanes 2 Playtest” section just under the game overview, and click “Request Access”. When the demo comes out, it will immediately be added to your Steam library so you can just download and play! We’re also steadily ramping up playtesting for the demo version, so if you click that button you may get randomly selected to help test stuff a little bit early :)
[/p][p][/p][p]One last thing. Although we weren’t able to participate in it ourselves, if you’re looking for new stuff to play or just want something to hold you over for a little bit before the 27th, we do highly encourage checking out what Next Fest has to offer, and wishlisting anything you end up enjoying. There’s a lot of cool stuff in there made by lots of great game developers, it’s all free, and you might just find something you really like. There’s a couple demos I’d like to personally shout out:[/p][p][/p][p]Hijong Park’s Defender Patrol [/p][p]A low poly flight simulator where you fly an MD-500MG, a cute little armed scout helicopter that would eventually be developed into the iconic Little Bird. It has a very interactive cockpit, and although it’s playable in flatscreen I highly recommend trying it in VR if you’re able to as it’s really fun there.[/p][p][/p][p]In The Black [/p][p]For any hard sci-fi nerds who may be reading this, In The Black is kind of a dream come true. It’s a realistic first-person spaceship combat simulator where you have to fly around using actual orbital mechanics. It’s not like flying a plane where you can just change directions on a dime; if you want to change the direction you’re moving or come to a stop, you’d better be prepared to manually cancel your velocity by burning in the opposite direction.[/p][p][/p][p]Nobody at Jundroo is affiliated with these games or any of their developers, I just think they’re cool and worth a shoutout.[/p][p][/p][p]That’s all for now, thanks for your patience and we’ll see you soon.[/p]

[p]Like its predecessor, in SimplePlanes 2 you’ll be able to play a number of activities, ranging from races to combat challenges to some less conventional activities we’ll get into soon. Unlike SP1 though, in SP2 you’ll be able to play all of these activities in multiplayer![/p][p][/p][p]In SP2, there are a bunch of races for you to choose from in a variety of locations, from traditional circuit races on the Driftwood Circuit, to long sprints through a winding touge, to dangerous air races that let you thread the needle to truly off your aircraft piloting skills.[/p][p][/p][p]To start an activity, click the activities button in the flight scene and select something. If selecting a race, set a number of laps (if applicable), and anyone in a multiplayer game will have a chance to decide whether or not to participate, as well as change their craft to something appropriate for the task. Once in a race, it’s the familiar setup of ring checkpoints you’re used to from SP1, with some visual and quality of life improvements, such as being able to restart from the last checkpoint if you messed up (or if someone rudely bumped you off course).

(this particular gif is a blooper from a developer playtest)[/p][hr][/hr][p]To test out the lethality of your crafts, there are some combat activities to try out, best done with friends! As some of these are team-based, the in-game targeting system has been updated to allow easy differentiation between friend and foe, with allies appearing blue, enemies appearing red, and neutral crafts being green.[/p][p][/p][p]In Deathmatch, the goal is simple: blow up more players than everybody else. It may be advisable to bring a craft with multirole capabilities, as some players may opt to bring a ground-based anti-air vehicle rather than an aircraft, which would be rather unfortunate for anybody unprepared.[/p][p][/p][p]In Bomber Intercept, enemy bombers are coming to blow up the airport! Your job is to intercept and destroy them, denying them... whatever goal it is they're trying to achieve. But be careful, they've brought fighter escorts that you'll have to deal with before you have a chance to eliminate the main threat. More players in multiplayer means more bombers and escorts, so you'll have to work together to defeat them.
[/p][hr][/hr][p]Alongside the relatively conventional activities like races and Deathmatch, we have some curveballs that offer more unique gameplay.[/p][p][/p][p]In Mech Invasion, massive bipedal mechs are emerging from the sea to storm Driftwood Island. Equipped with energy shields, guns, and lots of health, you’re gonna need to bring all the firepower you have in order to take them down. Please note that the footage you’ll see of this activity here is of a work in progress build of the game with placeholder models for the mechs – this was actually the team’s first ever time trying Mech Invasion.
[/p][p]Orb Snatcher is another multiplayer-based activity like Deathmatch, but with a more interesting twist. Around the map are numerous red orbs; fly (or drive) into one and it’ll start following your craft. You can pick up as many as you want at once, with the goal being to deposit them at a set location. Sounds simple enough, however – each orb you carry adds mass and drag to your craft, and other players can steal them from you, encouraging you to ponder how many orbs are worth picking up before becoming a target for other players.
[/p][p]We plan to add more silly activities like these as time goes on. When it comes to SimplePlanes, nothing is ever really out of the question here...[/p][hr][/hr][p]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 Serverr![/p]