Juno: New Origins News

As most of you already know we have been really busy working on SimplePlanes 2 but we managed to find some time to bring you a small-ish update to fix some concerning bugs we had been seeing affecting career, and while we were at it, spice things up a bit with a visual refresh, new celestial bodies and big performance improvements.

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It's no secret some of the contracts added in 1.3 have been technically challenging, we released multiple patches to try to address various issues making it hard to complete the Space Station and Rover contracts.

Even with all those efforts there were still various game breaking bugs we struggled to reproduce, but thanks to all your bug reports we think we have finally fixed them for good 🤞.

Sadly if you got a contract really stuck it may need to be canceled and restarted, if you find yourself in a hard to solve situation let us know.

On the topic of Career Mode, if you like to play in the Solar System there's been a lot of progress by @SatelliteTorifune on a mod free Custom Career for RSS. If you are interested you can check out a preview and share your feedback here.

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We didn't want to leave you with just a couple bug fixes, so to spice things up we have done a pass through the whole Image Effects to enhance the visuals of the game. You can expect a brighter and more colorful experience now, especially in Map View, as well as better looking lens flares when looking at the sun.

Disclaimer: Droods can sungaze safely thanks to their helmets, staring at the Sun can cause irreversible damage.

Additionally we have finally caught one of the most reported bugs ever, that caused the player orbit line to look black in some devices. No more squinting to see your orbits!



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The keen eyes may have noticed something odd in that Map View screenshot... you are right! We have made from scratch our Skybox, in an effort kickstarted by @Brixxter with a Blender project set up to render cubemaps.

From that point I got a bit carried and overhauled the whole project, leading to what now is not just a new, better looking and more realistic skybox for the game, but also a setting to bump up its resolution to 2x and 4x on PC, for all the low FoV enjoyers.



We have decided to share this project with everyone so you can make your own skyboxes, as far as I know it's the most advanced skybox generator available for free, you need some knowledge of blender to use it (both shaders and geometry nodes) but it is surprisingly easy to get into it. The skybox in the game has a secret that has been removed from the blender project, can you find it?

Download the project here

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As the Droods cleared their telescope lenses to capture the skybox in such high resolutions they noticed a strange object near Sergeaa. Upon further inspection it seems to be a Proto-Earth which they have decided to call Oord.



Strangely it has water in its equator, the best theory so far is that its strange orbit, causing it to have a permanent partial eclipse by Sergeaa, has lowered its temperatures enough to sustain liquid water, probably brought by recent comet impacts.

Huge thanks to @HyperPatch for letting us use his Young Earth Exoplanet as a template, when I saw it I fell in love with it and knew it was the perfect fit for the style of Oord.

There is also a new outer body in the system with a really dark and interesting story, including the first song added to the game in half a decade! Can you unveil the mysteries behind Cladh? No gifs for this one, you will have to visit it for yourself to see it.

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As per usual there's more to this update, you can find all the changes in the Release Notes, like the new Vizzy blocks for the Texture Widget in the MFDs or fixes to some memory leaks that have been affecting RAM usage for years.

It's been a while since we started this beta! We had to deal with some bureaucratic hiccups we weren't expecting but we are finally on the clear :D Now onto what comes with 1.3, which is actually a lot.

As an ice breaker, something that can be often missed: With 1.3 we are bringing some big performance improvements, which will especially benefit large part count crafts. We have seen some cases that now run more than twice as fast! On top of improving performance, we have also done some quality of life improvements that although subtle, can have a great impact on gameplay, like overhauling the Rocket Engine exhaust damage, and the visuals of the exhausts.

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Performance aside, the main focus of this update is overhauling the Career Mode experience:

• 15 unique rescue contracts across land, water, space... even on Luna's surface!
  
• A whole suite of Space Station contracts, providing you some prebuilt sections to use, while letting you shape the station however you want
  
• 6 new payloads to send to orbit and land on Droo's moons and a new payload to send on its journey to the stars
  
• Crew Bonuses, which will give you Tech Points if you complete some of the contracts while having crew aboard
  
• A rebalance of the contract tree, with adjusted prizes and an improved flow of contracts as you leave Droo's orbit
  
• A handful of new parameters to use in custom careers, for those that want to push the challenge further
  

A lot of the effort to get these contracts done started almost a year ago and we couldn't have done them without the help of a certain elementary particle, who has balanced his studies and an internship to bring to life some really cool crafts and payloads.

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In order to embrace proceduralism even more we are pushing things up a notch with a new suite of tools for the designer that will let you change the curvature of the nosecones to whatever shape you want, clamp the fuselages to flatten their sides allowing for really complex shapes and use any symmetry amount.

We have also made it possible to customize the lift and drag curves of the wings to your liking, so you can simulate any wing profile, the internal jet engine properties so you can simulate any jet engine you can imagine, and rocket engine properties to let you define how many ignitions an engine can have.



Depth adds a lot of detail to your builds, but often when wanting to poke a hole the complexity of a craft balloons. An overhaul on the depth masks (the tech used for the landing gears to fake their gap) allows jet engines, rocket engines and RCS to still look hollow even if you push them into other parts. You will also be able to disable the depth mask to finally have transparent landing gear and cockpits.



Wings are also getting some love, now letting you attach things on their surface, having an option for auto-resize to ease having compound wings and getting smooth shapes, and with new default lift and drag curves based on xfoil simulations done by ourselves to ensure they are more accurate on a wider range of Angles of Attack.

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Another great addition in this update is a new set of stock crafts focusing on land, water and air, to bring more diversity and serve as examples on how to build almost any type of vehicle in the game, from walking robots to helicopters without gyros, without using the tinker panel, cheats or complex Vizzy scripts.

We got the help of some of the best builders in the community, and although our standards for the stock crafts were high, they smashed them harder than anyone could have imagined.

• @ChuckNotChunk has proven how far the blades can go, with some surprisingly simple Vizzy scripts achieving the best Fly by Wire I've seen in the game
  
• @ChaoticGraviton thought making the new payloads and rescue crafts wasn't enough of a challenge and decided to make a bushplane with the help of @ExcaliburAerospace
• @ExcaliburAerospace himself reimagined the SimpleMartian rover and made a really cute submarine
  
• @Mostly designed a very peaceful drone
  
• @Spenzerointernational brought his top notch skills at making large planes with an impressive cargo plane
  
• @NebulaSpaceAgency took care of the cargo on the seas, with an enormous freighter
  
• @TN920 pulled of something crazy in record time, a walking sci-fi robot capable of traversing almost any terrain, with some of the smoothest animations ever
  
• And last but not least, @Mod decided to remake from scratch is SimpleOffroader and decided to add a Hypersonic Plane and a Rescue Vessel to the mix, now covering rockets, planes, boats and cars. Is there anything he can't build?
  

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If you want to check out all that is new you can do so in the Release Notes.

PS: In case you haven't seen it yet, we have announced a new game!

As you may have already seen, we have been collaborating with Linx to help him port his KSP mod "Parallax" into JNO. The mod is available here and it brings some jaw dropping visual enhancements to the game.

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The two main areas where we have focused are the rocket engine exhausts and the procedural wings but there are more changes and improvements you can find in the Release Notes.

[h2]NEW EXHAUST[/h2]
It has been more than 4 years since JNO got one of its signature features, the visual expansion of its plumes in procedural rocket engines. After this long it is easy to forget how ground-breaking that moment was, but since then the visuals lagged a bit behind and you sure let us know!



For this facelift we have decided not just to reimplement the visuals and logic behind this dynamic plumes, but also to hand you the wheel and let you choose how you want them to look with over a dozen properties to tweak the shape and color of the hottest part in your crafts.

[h2]PROCEDURAL WINGS[/h2]
Jundroo is well known for its love for airplanes, but we have always received complaints about how un-aerodynamic our wings look. Players have been forced to tinker with the physics of wings to hide them within fuel tanks in an unnecessarily complicated process, but that ends with 1.2.



Wings have had different physics airfoils in the game forever, that realistically model how the wing would behave, but now that also comes with a visual companion, making it easy to identify what type of airfoil the wing is using and what face is pointing up. No more flat bottom tail wings! And if you aren't happy with those, we have exposed all the parameters that define their shape in the hidden properties, so you can recreate whatever aircraft you want.

[h2]VARIOUS IMPROVEMENTS[/h2]
Maybe not as obvious as the previous two, but to continue with the idea of the facelift we have bumped up the visual fidelity in space by including an Ultra setting to the atmospheres, increasing by 8 times their precision and thus reducing their sawtooth artifacts, and also by accounting for the terrain slopes in the generation of the Scaled Space textures on Very High cubemap settings and above.



And to help you fly through the mountains to gasp at how amazing Parallax looks, we have also brought the Mouse Joystick feature from SimplePlanes, so you can smoothly sail the air even without a controller.

When 1.0 came out there were two clear problems with the progression of Career mode: planes going from gliders to jet engines and crew not being relevant. We took our time because we wanted to get things right, and I think you will like what the result is.

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We like things being procedural, giving you as much flexibility as possible when building the wildest of creations. Who would've guessed, procedural isn't easy! The new propeller part is the result of many months of work, starting last year, and it is a game changer for both air and water vehicles.



One of the main complaints we have received since the release of 1.0 is that the game lacks some soul. We think flossing or doing weird faces would be out of character for the Droods, but we want to let you do whatever you want. So if you want to floss, you can floss, all you want!

Until now, whenever you had crew sitting in a chair in your crafts they were forced to stay in a boring and rigid pose. With 1.1 we are adding puppeteering options to the chairs, so you can have your crew interact with the controls in your craft, dance, or even make all sorts of torture machines.



After 1.0 many smaller updates came with Quality of Life improvements, and that wasn't all we had to come in that department! 1.1 comes with overhauled sounds, more accessible tutorials, context menus in Map View, resizable Info Panels and a cheat menu in flight so you will never have to open the dev console ever again.

Cheats will show up both in Sandbox and in the new game mode, Hybrid, that combines all of the missions from Career with all the fun from Sandbox, with infinite money, everything unlocked from the get go, cheats, saved launch locations... We can't wait to see all the crazy ways you can figure out how to do The Jump.



That's not all! 1.1 also brings resizable blocks and a new version of it that not only looks like a sphere but uses a sphere collider, and we also made intra-craft docks a thing, making some even wilder creations possible.

There's lots more in the update that you can find in the full Release Notes and more to come in the coming weeks, including the Crew and Tourist contracts.

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In Patch 1.1.105 we have added some neat features for Crew Transfer, Vizzy and tests for rescue contracts.

In 1.1.106 new test contracts and bug fixes.

For the last month you may have noticed we have been acting a bit weird. We said we were going to go straight to 1.1 with the propellers and more contracts, but we got a bit sidetracked... Today we can finally talk about it, a collaboration with the European Space Agency!



We have been in talks with ESA to include JUICE in the game. The JUpiter ICy moons Explorer is the first European mission to visit a Gas Giant. It will launch tomorrow, April 13th, from Kourou, French Guiana, on top of an Ariane V, heading towards the moons of Jupiter after an insane chain of Gravity Assist.

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To commemorate this launch we have added a new Sandbox Challenge to the game, where you'll be in charge of getting JUICE to visit all moons of Tydos with the least possible Delta-V. In order to better support this mission we have added new properties to the solar panel arrays, such as a new hinge with a custom deployment animation to match the ones in JUICE and the ability to override through the hidden properties how many panels are in each row. Also taking the opportunity to flesh out some issues that the arrays had before.



We have put a lot of focus on improving the Map View experience, with an overhaul of the Planned Burns, Closest Approach calculations, clarity improvements and a ton of bug fixes to ensure a smooth experience when visiting other worlds.

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Thanks a lot to ESA for wanting to be a part of Juno: New Origins and bring this amazing mission to the game. All the new features are not just available for the challenge, so you will be able to enjoy the new solar panels and improved Map View in your own careers and sandboxes.

If you want to learn more about JUICE, here are some useful links:

The Update Trailer

Watch The Launch

Learn More About JUICE

1.0.900 Release Notes 1.0.909 Release Notes