Deadstick - Bush Flight Simulator News

Hey bush pilots,

There has been steady progress in our development and recent milestones have brought us progress on things like; Pilot Reputation, Job Complexity, Improved Landscape, Weather systems and Runway surfaces, Remote bush airstrips and so much more.

We'll remind you that all of our screenshots and video footage shared is work in progress and should change over time. Which we are sure you'll begin to notice as we share more and more.

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]
We spent some time stress testing the foliage amount, is 3 million trees enough? Turns out it's not and we expect we'll need 30+ million trees over the full map.



Weather from inside the cockpit. If it rains, snows or is super foggy, someone needs to complete those cargo deliveries, right?

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]
When bush flying you expect to see some incredible views, and the Aurora Borealis is just one of them. 🌌

We'll see you next month for another developer update! Don't forget to join our Discord, wishlist Deadstick and stay tuned for news about future playtests.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/771800/Deadstick__Bush_Flight_Simulator/

Is there something you'd like to see? Let us know in the comments!


- Mythwright

Hey bush flyers,

It’s now 2025 and we are at full throttle with development of Deadstick, our goal is to make Deadstick a believable world of wonder with interesting points to discover as you progress through the game. So in our first community update of 2025 we are focusing on day/night cycle and want to share some sneak peeks at the work we’ve been doing around the scale of the game.

So let’s start with the size and scale of the map. We have been planning out where mountains, lakes, valleys, and rivers are located ahead of our next step, populating the world! Things like trees, foliage, rocks, and rivers etc, will be added and we’ll be sharing snippets within our dev logs and social media channels soon. So, yes, if you think the world looks a little sparse, you are right and we’ll have updates for you in the future around this…🌲



The screenshots we have to share today show another crucial element of the believable world, a fully simulated day / night cycle. The Sun tracks from East to West during the day and then at night a star skybox is in place, with the moon simulated through an 8 phase cycle. Waxing from new moon to full moon then waning back to new moon over a number of in game days. At night in the wilderness the moon, accurately reflecting on to the terrain surfaces, is the main source of light. The phase of the moon combined with weather conditions will need to factor into any decision to take on a flight between dusk and dawn.



Temperature is also an important simulation element, impacting the performance of the plane and making icing another risk to factor into gameplay decision making. The scale of the map allows for distinct biomes with different temperature profiles and the day, night cycle will also factor into this, so you can expect colder temperatures at night and the highest temperatures at midday.

If there is an element of Deadstick you would like to know more about, please let us know in the comments.

Thanks for reading, and we'll be back with another update soon!

Please do not forget to follow us on our social channels:

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- Mythwright

Hey bush flyers,

Last month we shared some images of how our work in progress hangar was looking, and today we are here to share a further update on this.

We want to show the difference that upgrading the game to Unity 6's HDRP has made and explain how we got here.

Then


Now


Utilizing Unity's HDRP physically based materials (PBR) we are able to really improve the overall visual quality of the scene. Using this pipeline the lighting is affected by different surface materials giving us a more realistic experience. Compared to traditional materials, all PBR channels support textures which gives the material more information about how to interact with light. It breaks down each of the materials physical properties and simulates how each would interact with light in the real world. For example, a wood material would have a high diffuse and low reflectivity. PBR materials also use a shading model that is simulated from how reflection and refraction work in the real world.

Then


Now


To further improve the overall quality and detail inside the Hangar, we have also remodelled and upscaled the textures for each of the props, decorative assets and the structure. Lastly we baked the lighting into the scene with global illumination, this enabled us to simulate how light bounces off surfaces and affects the surrounding environment - as opposed to being limited to just the light that hits an object directly.

Then


Now


Thanks for reading, and we'll be back with another update soon!

Please do not forget to follow us on our social channels:

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- Mythwright

Happy Monday everyone ✈️

We are reviving the Flight Log series today, and planning on bringing them to you more frequently!

In today’s development update we wanted to talk a little bit about Unity and why we chose to stick with this engine as this seemed to be a common question with our announcement. We’ll also have a few images to share of some retextured High Definition Render Pipeline (HDRP) plane renders.

[h3]Why did we choose this engine / version for Deadstick?[/h3]

We chose to stay with Unity so we could build on the work already done by Chris and his team and it gave us a good head start on development.

We upgraded to the latest version of Unity to take advantage of HDRP. This offers many visual improvements over URP (Universal Render Pipeline) or the previously used render pipeline. Unity released this spotlight video to showcase the capabilities of HDRP.

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

Disclaimer: This video is used for informational purposes only. All rights belong to the original creator.

[h3]Advanced physically based surfaces[/h3]

HDRP gives us a much better graphic quality and greater fidelity of surface textures and materials across the board. We are able to use advanced shaders with customisable subsurface scattering, translucency, iridescence, anisotropy and real time tessellation and provide Deadstick at a much higher graphical standard.

[h3]Immersive Lighting [/h3]

HDRP uses correct physical light sources with much greater control over the lighting including the light types, shadow options, light exposure and control, light baking, ray marching and ray tracing and reflections, global illumination, volumetric lighting, that's not to say we will use all of this everywhere, but it gives us more options with greater quality.


[h3]Spectacular Atmosphere[/h3]

All of the HDRP tools and rendering options allow for some procedural skies, volumetric fog, volumetric clouds and weather, all adding to the atmosphere of flying an aircraft in near realistic conditions and providing the player with a fully immersive flying experience.

[h3]Maximise Platform Performance[/h3]

Using HDRP we are able to maximise performance by utilising the Burst and Job system and upsampling algorithms such as NVIDIA DLSS or AMD FSR.

[h3]Example Retextured HDRP Plane Renders[/h3]



Please note that images and videos shown are not representative of the final visuals, all are work in progress while we work on development.

Thanks for reading all, and we’ll be back with another developer update soon.

Please do not forget to follow us on our social channels:

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- Mythwright

Hi pilots,

It’s been a long time since a news post has gone live, today that changes. We have a major development update for you on the status of Deadstick, and who else to bring you this information but Chris Cheetham himself.

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

To highlight some of the main topics of this video:

• New Deadstick publisher, Mythwright.
  
• New Deadstick developer, Spiral House.
  
• Deadstick development updates - incoming and more transparency with the community.
  

The reason we have decided to work on Deadstick is because we believe in it, and want to make sure it becomes a reality. Our aim is to share as much with you, our community as possible between now and launch. This will be a range of information from developer diaries, short videos/gifs, to screenshots of the game being developed - not all news will be a major update but we want to make sure you are along for the journey, you can also join us on our Discord to chat with other pilots.

We hope you will join us in celebrating this new Deadstick era and continue with your patience while the game restarts its development journey.

- The Mythwright Team