SimplePlanes News

When you are building rockets, you're most likely going to run into the occasional rapid unscheduled disassembly. It happens to even the most experienced rocket surgeons. You might as well embrace it and take advantage of the opportunity and snag some spectacular photos.



In addition to the visuals, we also improved the physics of the explosions quite a bit. Now larger fuel tanks will create much larger explosions. We also approximate the surface area of parts and use that to determine how much it should react to an explosion. I've spent far too many hours now sitting on the launch pad blowing up parts before realizing that I had long ago crossed the line between working and playing. Don't tell the other devs.

Here are some more great shots I got this weekend. And of course, a GIF to make this post look complete.



I apologize to the BaconAircraft, Tully, CjrLdy, Shigure, and CoolPeach for blowing up their beautiful crafts.

I would like to apologize to everyone for the intermittent outages on our websites. Our service provider is having issues and they are aware of the issue and working on it. Hopefully, they will figure this out soon.

Also, I should probably mention something about schedule (I know my fellow devs love when I talk about the S-word). We are not going to be launching in October and we are now most likely going to be launching in early November. Please, don't send me any black licorice. I have already purchased some and will be munching on it soon. Sorry for the slippage, but thanks for sticking with us! We hope it will be worth the wait!

The Nav Circle in SR1 made it very easy to control rockets in a 2D game. It took me a while to figure out the best way to extend the Nav Circle into three dimensions. I ended up with basically two nav circles: one for heading and one for pitch. The end result is now called the Nav Sphere and it makes controlling rockets in 3D extremely easy.



The blue circle is for controlling the pitch of the rocket and the orange circle is for controlling the heading. You can click and drag the circles to adjust them or you can use keyboard inputs (or a gamepad) to control them. We will probably tweak the visuals a bit before release, but I'm really happy with how they've turned out.

SimpleRockets 2 now has a coming soon page on Steam along with a new teaser trailer to entice you to come check it out!

https://store.steampowered.com/app/870200/SimpleRockets_2

We're still shooting to release on Steam Early Access this summer. We plan to keep adding features and responding to player feedback until we feel the game is ready, at which point we will release the final version on all platforms at the same time. This includes iOS, Google Play, Humble, GOG, and of course Steam (Windows and macOS).

Some of you have noticed that a small update has been released.

Why are we releasing such a small update?

I'm sure a lot of you may have noticed emails from a bunch of companies with updated privacy policies in response to GDPR. We have been doing preparation ourselves and decided to ease the burden by removing non-essential third-party libraries from SimplePlanes, giving us less to worry about. This includes the Facebook SDK, Unity Analytics, and Everyplay (since it was discontinued by Unity).

We also removed the ability to register from within the game and now redirect to the website to centrally locate account creation.

We didn't want to make it totally feature-less though, so Andrew included a few XML modding related items that advanced modders have been asking for.

I know it may be disappointing to see an update come down the pipe with so few features, but rest assured that we will resume working on 1.8 later this year as we've previously discussed.

Official 1.7.1.0 release notes:

• Removed Everyplay. Unfortunately, Everyplay is shutting their services down, so we had to remove it.
  
• Removed in-game registration. Registration must now be done through SimplePlanes.com.
  
• Added dragScale, calculateDrag, and diffuseInertiaTensors XML attributes
  

Discussion : https://www.simpleplanes.com/Forums/View/789331/v1-7-1-0-Minor-update-info

Thanks!
Philip

SimpleRockets 2 is currently under development. We are hoping to release on Steam Early Access in June. You can read more about our development here and also read our FAQ here.