In the last showcase, which you can find here if you missed it, we talked about what we're doing to make the UI in SimplePlanes 2 better than ever.
But we’ve yapped long enough about the map and UI for now; this is of course a game all about building aircraft, and many of you at this point are no doubt wondering what exactly we’ve done to build on the experience SimplePlanes and Juno: New Origins gave you. Well, wonder no longer, for I present to you…
The Fully Procedural Curvy Wings of Your Dreams
That is a lot of words. What do they mean? Well, in essence, it means Nicky has been spending nearly five whole years working to give you an insanely customizable new wing part that you can shape to your heart’s content, right down to the NACA airfoil shape if you want. There is no base 3D model to start with here like the old wings had, they are created completely on the fly using magic (procedural generation), and they look like actual wings instead of the boxes from before (sidenote, those old wings are still in the game unchanged and will be what SimplePlanes 1 crafts loaded into SimplePlanes 2 use, but they’ll be inaccessible from the parts list). These wings are such a huge addition that we’ll have multiple showcases dedicated solely to them, so keep an eye out for those! Now let’s get the introduction out of the way and show you what all this actually lets you do.
On a basic level, changing the shape of your wing works much the same way as it did before: you have a 3D gizmo that you can click and drag to manipulate different parts of the wing. But in addition to that we’ve given you a panel that lets you fine tune the shape using numbers, similar to the fuselage editor. I know I said we were done yapping about the UI for now, but I lied. Sorry.
When editing your wing, you’ll notice an “Add Section” button. Click on that and another section will be added to the end of your wing, which you can change the shape and airfoil of (more on airfoils in a moment) independently of the previous section, and you can bend one section to add a curve leading to the next section for dihedral wings or whatever other diabolical shapes you can come up with. The possibilities of this segment system are endless – you can have varying thickness on different parts of the wing, leading edge extensions, and all sorts of complex shapes, all as a single part. No inflating the part count to get a cool wing shape; whatever you end up doing here is just one singular part.
Now, as mentioned before, you can also customize the airfoil shape. The same basic symmetric, semi-symmetric, and flat bottom options from before are still here, but for you more advanced players we’ve added a NACA 4-digit setting, allowing you to play around with your wing’s camber height, camber offset, and thickness, all majorly affecting your wing’s flight characteristics. For instance, a thin airfoil will net you less drag but it’ll be brutal in a stall, with the opposite being true for a thicker airfoil. You can set different airfoil shapes per wing section, with the game attempting to smoothly interpolate from one shape to the other. This adds a lot of depth to how you set up your aircraft, and we’re excited to get it into your hands.
When it came to aerodynamic control of your craft, your options were pretty limited in SP1. You pretty much had to either use a boring box built into the wing, or an all-moving wing using a rotator. For SP2, we’ve completely overhauled the way control surfaces work, adding them as independent parts in the parts list that you can freely add to your wing. These will seamlessly match the geometry of the wing and can be shaped more easily than before since they’re independent parts.
We’ve also added a number of new types of control surface! These each serve a unique function to manipulate the physics of your craft in different ways. More will likely be made over time, but as of this showcase you can expect:
Standard Flap
These are your typical control surfaces. You use these for pitch, roll, and yaw. Or for some other unorthodox purpose, I won’t judge
Brake Flap
These serve the same function as the Standard Flap, but they can split in two to serve as airbrakes when needed. Useful for slowing down, or as yaw control on a tailless aircraft if you’re feeling experimental.
Fowler Flap
These slide backwards (and downwards if you give enough input) to increase the surface area of your wing, thereby granting you extra lift. Essential for takeoff and landing on most aircraft.
Slat
These do a very similar thing to the Fowler Flap, but the key difference is they are attached to the leading edge (the front) of your wing instead of the trailing edge (the rear).
These have been highly requested features for a long time, and we hope they are to your liking :)
Wings are cool and all, but unless you’re making a flying wing you generally need something to actually put them on. That’s where the other big thing Nicky has been working on comes in:
New & Improved Fuselages!
While there is lots of evidence to prove that the fuselages in SP1 are plenty capable, they do still leave a bit to be desired in terms of functionality, ease of use (especially for new players), and not being a headache for developers to work with. So, for SP2, we’re giving you a brand new fuselage part from scratch that is capable of everything the original is but with loads of new features and optimizations.
Among these new features are new ways to alter the shape of a fuselage. To start off simple, we’ve brought in the fine corner radius control from Juno. This means that rather than having the four basic corner options you’re used to, you can just use a slider to make the corners however you want them. On a more technical note we’ve also optimized this so that the level of detail is now dynamic, allowing us to dynamically give curved fuselages more detail and square fuselages less detail, rather than every shape having the same number of vertices like before.
But that’s not all! What about the space between the corners? We’ve given those some love too: you can now give each edge a bit of curvature, which will give that edge an inflated shape. This is invaluable for easy replication of a number of real aircraft cross sections, which leads nicely into our next big feature.
You now have a trapezoid slider! This lets you transform the cross section of your fuselage from a rectangle into a trapezoidal shape (or just a triangle if you go extreme enough), and works alongside the edge curve feature to give you far more control over the cross sectional shape of a fuselage than we’ve ever given you before, and I’m certain it’s going to lead to some insane creations once you get your hands on it.
Moving on from shapes, we’ve also completely overhauled the colliders (aka hitboxes). Colliders are now dynamically created based on the shape of your fuselages, which has a number of useful implications but perhaps most notably it means that hollow fuselages are actually hollow! You can move things through them! You can walk through them! You can… I don’t know what else to put here but whatever you’re thinking it’s probably possible now! This is a very exciting change all on its own and I look forward to seeing what you do with it.
And finally, there are now more paint trims on the fuselage. In addition to painting the exterior like you’re used to, at long last you can now separately paint the interior and both ends.
And this is all just the beginning. We have a lot of exciting plans in the pipeline for these fuselages, but we aren’t ready to talk about those just yet so keep an eye out for more info in the coming months!