Greetings! Today the Steam Summer Sale begins, where all of our games are on sale! SimplePlanes 2 is 10% off, and our other games are a whopping 75% off!
To celebrate the occasion, we've prepared a big new update for y'all to beta test: Procedural Landing Gear!
Please note: This is a big update, and as such you enter the beta at your own risk. Crafts may break despite our best efforts. Crafts saved in this beta will NOT be loadable in older versions of the game, even if they don't use new parts!
Because of the risk, this beta is in a new "landing_gear" branch so that you won't auto-update if you're opted in to the regular beta branch.
HOW TO PLAY THE BETA:
1. Right click SimplePlanes 2 in your Steam library
2. Click on Properties
3. Click on Game Versions & Betas
4. In the version list, click "landing_gear"
Those of you who've been with us for a while may think of the procedural landing gear we added to Juno quite some time ago, but we've cooked up something far more powerful, offering a HUGE amount of customization while still remaining user-friendly. If you want to just read the patch notes you can go here (or skip to the bottom of this post if you're reading this on Steam), but if you want to get a rundown of how the new gear works read on!
Gear Leg
The leg is the heart of your landing gear, with multiple different types ranging from slim fighter jet nose legs to bulky airliner rear legs, and many ways to customize them. Add a support strut, a torque link, and more! The suspension is customizable very similarly to the double wishbone suspension, so you can tune the physics to your liking.
You can also add the new and improved Bay part to give it a place to stay in, featuring customizable door options at long last! There's a new part welding feature that'll let you easily keep the bay and landing gear stuck together.
Wheel Assembly
The wheel assembly is much like a regular wheel, except it has a frame to conveniently attach to a leg, fuselage, or wing. There are a variety of styles to choose from that cover all sorts of landing gear configurations, and like a normal wheel you can customize the tires, treads, rim, and more to get things looking how you want them to.
Possibly the coolest thing about this though is what happens when you move the wheel. Use the translation tool to nudge the wheel around and you'll see the leg effortlessly adapt its shape to reach the wheel, its mechanical bits working as best they can to make a convincing piece of landing gear!
Animation Editor
These parts are cool and all, but there's one more really powerful tool at your disposal now: the Animator tab. Real-life landing gear works in a variety of mysterious and unique ways depending on the aircraft, with the gear often not simply extending or collapsing in a strictly linear way.
So, in the Gear Leg's part properties, you can set keyframes to animate the entire extension/retraction process yourself without fiddling with individual pistons and rotators that need relatively complex input setups.
The Animator can be as simple or as complex as you want. For a very simple animation you can simply have one keyframe on one end where the wheel is positioned downwards and another keyframe on the other end where the wheel is tucked inside the bay, or you can make it more complicated by adding any number of keyframes in between where the strut, support strut, doors, and wheel are all doing their own things. If you want to take things even further, the animation is based on the leg's current input which is just set to the landing gear button by default, but you can use custom inputs to do even more. The potential of this tool is immense, and we're very curious to see what you all will do with it.
Feedback
The core of the system is in place and we're really happy with how it's come together. Let us know about any obvious bugs, pain points or rough edges in the workflow, and suggestions for new gear leg and wheel assembly styles. We're also keen for feedback on how the gear feels — the mass, suspension, and physics — so let us know if something seems off and what kind of aircraft you noticed it on.
Thank you for playing, let us know what you think!
v0.7.05
New Location unlocked! Say hello to the Coughinton Refinery!
We've added a brand-new, modular landing gear system built around three new parts: the Wheel Assembly, the Gear Leg, and the Gear Bay. Because they're separate parts, you're free to mix and match them however you like.
Wheel Assembly
Built on the same new wheel physics as our other new wheels, with a style option to cycle through configurations: single, dual, tandem, and multi-wheel bogies (quad and six-wheel). The assembly steers for taxiing, and since it's its own part you can pair it with our gear legs or drop it onto your own custom-built landing gear exactly like you always have — now with far more capable bogies to build with.
Gear Leg
A suspension leg designed to work hand-in-hand with the Wheel Assembly. We've included several prebuilt styles, with tunable suspension (travel, spring, damping), and procedural sizing. Support struts and the torque link bend and follow along automatically as the gear extends, retracts, and steers. And retraction runs on a completely new and very robust keyframe animation system, giving you full control over how your gear folds away — including complex animations across the leg, wheels, support struts, and bay doors.
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, and taper, by dragging handles or typing exact values — or flip on Auto Size and let it wrap itself around your gear leg's retracted footprint. Choose from single or double door styles, animate it all on the same keyframe system as the rest of your gear, and link several bays onto one shared timeline for a symphony of complex landing gear mayhem.
Environment
Added a new location in the Vetusta island, the Coughinton Refinery
Added new runway lights to the Bannock Station
Added a new SAR hangar and office building in the Bannock Station, and labels to identify all the buildings there
Improved most of the bridges found around the islands
Parts
Allowed base pylon attach points to manually connect to multiple parts
Removed non-powertrain seek behavior for the propeller assembly
Improved the performance of label parts
Fixed text decals sizing incorrectly in the flight scene
Fixed an issue where crafts would fail to load if decals referenced missing part IDs
Fixed an issue preventing SimplePlanes 1 crafts with legacy detacher parts from loading
UX / UI
Changed refueling drogue activations to use a dropdown menu
Prevented the user interface from hiding when taking screenshots for bug reports
Fixed spinner properties preventing adjustment to their minimum or maximum values
Fixed the menu incorrectly switching to multiplayer settings when spawning an AI in a multiplayer server
Physics
Improved the physics behavior of wheels when disconnected from a craft
Fixed an issue where wheels without suspension would constantly lose contact with the ground
Fixed explosive weapons disappearing when underwater
Fixed afterburners failing to turn off after oxygen deprivation
Fixed an issue with NaN values in jet engine calculations
Fixed Chad teleporting to a destroyed craft when seated in a separated part
Misc
Added support for welding and grouping parts together in the designer to move as a single unit
Fixed the undo function not correctly reverting craft instructions in the designer
Fixed an issue where Overload would shift parts when applying changes
Fixed craft properties not including disconnected parts
Fixed an issue where a corrupted control settings file could prevent the game from starting
Fixed an issue preventing players from leaving the flight scene under certain conditions