After nearly a month of public beta testing, SP2 version 0.7.6.1 is now LIVE, with brand new Procedural Landing Gear, bay doors, the new Coughinton Refinery location, and a whole host of performance improvements and bug fixes! You can find the full patch notes here, or on the bottom of this post if you're reading this on Steam.
Procedural Landing Gear
The star of this update is our brand new highly customizable procedural landing gear parts, with tons of styles that can each be customized into countless shapes, new bay doors that carve holes into fuselages and make doors, and customizable animations with keyframe editing. Getting fully into the weeds of the new gear would make this a ginormous post, so let's try to abridge things a bit.
Gear Leg
In the parts list there are now 17 different gear styles; 4 relatively simple styles for general aviation, 5 nose gears, and 8 rear gears. Most of these have a variety of options to change, including but not limited to: suspension tuning (like the double wishbone for cars), support strut/support strut style, torque link/torque link style, and catapult connector.
Wheel Assembly
The Gear Leg and Wheel Assembly are separate parts, so you can move or edit them independently (for your convenience, all of the gear prefabs in the parts list come with a Wheel Assembly preinstalled). Much like the car wheels, the Wheel Assembly has a ton of options to accommodate a variety of landing gear needs. One wheel, two wheel, four wheel, whatever your heart desires there's a good chance it's in there! It also doesn't have to be attached to a leg and can be attached to fuselages or wings on its own, so you could ignore its intended application for landing gear and use it for a motorcycle or something instead as I've seen at least one person do.
The Gear Leg and the Wheel Assembly are intertwined, so if you move an attached Wheel Assembly the Gear Leg and all its mysterious mechanical bits will do their very best to procedurally adapt in order to connect with the wheel. This means there's genuinely an endless variety of shapes and configurations you can do for your landing gear, so much more than was ever possible with the procedural gear we made for Juno many years back.
Gear Bay
The Gear Bay is like the hole and window cutting parts you're used to, except doors are placed in the hole, allowing you to conveniently stow away your landing gear without needing to mess with rotators and slicing and all that complicated stuff. You can have a left door, right door, front or back, doubles, whatever you want!
Animation Editing
For those of you who really like to get into the nitty-gritty with your crafts, the new gear parts support custom animations using an in-game keyframe-based animation editor. Here, you can make create keyframes, each of which define a different position and rotation at a specified point in the timeline for the wheel, doors, main strut, support strut, and probably some other stuff I'm forgetting. The gear will then interpolate between these keyframes to make an animation! The animation timeline is based on the input of the parts, so you should be able to combine custom animations with FunkyTrees to do some really advanced stuff with the right know-how.
New Location
On the northernmost point of the map, north-east of Vetusta City, a new location has been spotted...
Coughinton Refinery
The construction on Vetusta Island has finally finished, and now the Coughinton Refinery is available for you to play around in! It's a large oil refinery covered in buildings, smoke stacks, tanks, intricate pipes, and a port. It's been in our pipeline for a long time, and we're happy to have finally gotten it done! Most of the assets were done by Emmanuelle Le Nouaille, who you may recall us working with for several other parts of the game! She's once again been an amazing help, and we hope you all have fun exploring.
Performance
In addition to new content, for this update we've spent some time looking into ways we can improve performance, and you should notice significant framerate improvements in multiplayer and the designer in a lot of cases. Feedback and bug reports help us a lot with diagnosing performance problems, so keep them coming!
And that's a wrap for this post! This update ticked multiple items off our Roadmap, so if you voted for any of the stuff in this update your votes will get freed up to use for other things. Thanks for playing!
Patch Notes:
New: Procedural Landing Gear
A completely new landing gear system built from three parts that snap together, driven by a new keyframe animation system that gives you full control over how your gear folds away - across the leg, wheels, support struts, and bay doors.
Wheel Assembly
Built on our new wheel physics, with a style option to cycle through configurations: single, dual, tandem, and multi-wheel bogies (quad, six-wheel, and Single Arch). It steers for taxiing, and since it's its own part you can pair it with the new gear legs or drop it onto your own custom landing gear. Includes a range of tires and rims.
Gear Leg
A suspension leg designed to work hand-in-hand with the Wheel Assembly: several prebuilt styles, procedural sizing, and tunable suspension (travel, spring, damping). Pick support strut and torque link types right on the part and they bend and follow along automatically as the gear extends, retracts, and steers. Animate it simply by rotating the Main Strut. Includes catapult launch bars that swing down to connect to carrier catapults, with stowed, ready, and connected states.
Gear Bay
Drops onto a fuselage and automatically carves a clean hole with matching procedural bay doors (fuselages only for now - wing holes aren't supported yet). Sculpt its shape freely (depth, height, width, taper) by dragging handles or typing exact values, or flip on Auto Size to wrap it around your gear leg's retracted footprint. Choose single or double door styles, animate on the same keyframe system, and link several bays onto one shared timeline.
Environments
Added a new location on Vetusta island: the Coughinton Refinery
Bannock Station: added runway lights, a new SAR hangar and office building, building labels, realigned Hangar 4, and adjusted car spawners
New Yoke: updated road layouts, added AI lanes for the motorway merge, and added interdimensional tunnels
Improved bridges across the islands and fixed various bridge material assignments
Performance
Massively improved multiplayer performance around other players' craft with large rotating assemblies (VTOL nacelles, turrets, etc.)
Reduced intermittent lag spikes from large designer undo steps
Optimized craft loading in the flight scene
Optimized networked craft loading in multiplayer to reduce bandwidth and load times
Optimized the water system so foam is only simulated and rendered near water, and disabled shore waves on low water quality settings
Improved the performance of label parts
Improved overall performance and memory usage in the designer
Physics
Improved the physics behavior of wheels when disconnected from a craft
Fixed wheels without suspension constantly losing contact with the ground
Fixed a PhysX crash caused by wheels hitting a wall at high speed
Fixed afterburners failing to turn off after oxygen deprivation
Fixed wing viscous drag due to lift not applying correctly
Fixed brake flaps causing the wing solver to fail in rare circumstances
Weapons
Added a passThroughDistance attribute to cannons, controlling how far a projectile travels before it can collide with a craft
Fixed explosive weapons disappearing when underwater
Fixed cannon projectiles failing to collide with aircraft when "disable aircraft collisions" was enabled
Fixed bomb reticles incorrectly predicting impacts for non-ground targets
UX / UI
Changed refueling drogue, gauge input, and targeting pod activations from toggles to dropdown menus
Fixed control base presets incorrectly cycling to custom and hiding certain presets
Fixed the targeting reticle being unable to be disabled
Fixed the menu incorrectly switching to multiplayer settings when spawning an AI in a multiplayer server
Fixed ghost players and the host being unable to leave a session
Fixed peaceful mode persisting in solo mode after exiting a multiplayer session
Designer & Fixes
Weld and group parts together in the designer so they move as a single unit.
Fixed the undo function not correctly reverting craft instructions
Fixed undo/redo replacing newlines with spaces in label text
Fixed Overload shifting parts when applying changes
Fixed Overload leaving behind duplicate decal projectors, and decals disappearing when edited in Overload
Fixed text decals sizing incorrectly in the flight scene
Fixed crafts failing to load when decals referenced missing part IDs
Fixed SimplePlanes 1 crafts with legacy detacher parts failing to load
Fixed a corrupted control settings file preventing the game from starting
Fixed being unable to leave the flight scene under certain conditions
Fixed Chad teleporting to a destroyed craft when seated in a separated part
Misc
Fixed Vintage and Handy levers failing to fully disable aircraft collisions
Fixed exhaust intensity and positioning in engine nozzles to prevent mesh clipping
Allowed base pylon attach points to manually connect to multiple parts
