This is a small patch, mostly to fix a few things that were left unfinished in the latest release. Here are the major changes:
- ray traced shadows are activated again
- added possibility to clamp ship to booster (experimental)
- HSR can now be attached/detached/spawned from booster settings panel
- TWR on booster panel does now take into account ship, when it is detected
- “Retro” button does now activate a mode where it continuously updates the attitude target
- SQD has been finalized with animations, colliders and destruction
Below you can find the full changelog. If you are wondering why are there so many dates – that’s when updates to the dev version have been released. You can get access to the dev version, when you become a builder via the ko-fi commission.
Ship Quick Disconnect (SQD)
This has been a major time sink with this patch as I had to dig really deep into how to rig stuff in Unreal Engine, which I haven’t done before much, and I had to try out different methods on how to move the SQD. In the end I settled on what you can see in the screen shot from the editor above.
All the animations are happening in a control rig now. The only parts that are moved by physics are the main arm, the work platform and the QD plate that attaches to the Ship. These are driven directly through the blueprint and constraints.
A lot of time was also spent on how to animate the hoses. I even asked for help on the Unreal Source discord and some nice person suggested to use full body IK and it did the trick! Just needs some tinkering with all the settings.
Of course, there is a lot of room for polishing the SQD, especially since it doesn’t have proper textures yet. But for early access status, it’s good enough for the moment.
Unfortunately with the current method it won’t be easily possible to make it move so that you can connect to the ship without the HSR. So this possibility probably won’t come anytime soon and it’s not important anyway. This would be more for historical purposes and then one could as well also add the old SQD again.
Ship Clamping
It’s a very simple system, so don’t expect too much from it. It basically just lets you set up a constraint between ship and booster, if the ship is within a trigger box on top of the booster (what was previously the “Ship detected” text appearing instead of where the “Clamp Ship” button is now).
You also have an option in the booster settings panel to increase the strength of the clamps (the threshold at which the constraint breaks). If you set this to a very high value, you should be able to fly the full stack through almost any maneuver, with some exceptions. Like when you have an empty ship on top, this won’t hold very long, or when you have a fully loaded ship and you stop the engines while going full throttle.
Ray Traced Shadows
It’s really nice to have this back. I had to quickly disable it before the Steam release as there was a problem with dark areas on Nanite meshes that I only noticed shortly before release and I couldn’t look into it anymore. In the end it was an easy fix. The problem was that the shadows are calculated based on the fallback meshes and some method that can be affected with the command “r.RayTracing.NormalBias=10” – at this setting and with higher quality fallback meshes pretty much all the dark areas could be eliminated.
Outlook
Next thing will be having a go at the Linux version for Steam.
Then for next update at least Block 2 Starship is planned as I want to have it in before next flight. So it depends on when that happens. If soon, then not much more might be in this update.
I will also look into how to make the dev version available on Steam again for the people who don’t can or don’t want to use EGS for that.
Full Changelog
“2025-03-25:”:
[
“added a couple of colliders to the BQD”,
“fixed some small SQD issues”,
“fixed condensation effect bounding box”
],
“2025-03-24:”:
[
“finalized SQD with some hoses, colliders, LODs and destruction”,
“added toggle to run also ship script to booster settings panel”,
“fixed some smaller client side issues on SQD and subcooler”
],
“2025-03-21:”:
[
“added BigFlame and BoosterClamps commands to scripting”,
“added HSR multi function button to booster settings panel to attach/detach/spawn it”,
“removed detach HSR button from booster main panel”,
“it’s now possible to clamp ship to booster also when HSR is not present”,
“retro button does now activate a mode where it continuously updates the attitude target to retrograde orientation until it is turned off again”,
“TWR does now take into account ship, when it is detected”,
“changed LODBias on low preset back to 1 and instead adjusted booster and SPMT LOD a bit”,
“re-enabled ray traced shadows and increased drawing distance (r.RayTracing.NormalBias=10, r.RayTracing.Culling=0)”
],
“2025-03-17:”:
[
“added booster ship clamp strength setting to booster panel”,
“also adjusted detection range for the clamping a bit”
],
“2025-03-16:”:
[
“added clamp ship button to booster main panel”,
“added detach HSR button to booster main panel”,
“added raptor chill valve button to booster and ship panel”,
“added !blockFTS chat command and also made all chat commands case insensitive”,
“cryotanks (including subcoolers) are not exploding anymore when destruction is off”,
“fixed SQD (still haven’t added all hoses yet though)”,
“fixed OLM clamps”,
“fixed hot stage ring can only be attached and detached once to booster”,
“fixed LOX subcooler stops working when pressure is too high”,
“fixed some nitrogen storage tank parameters so that it should behave same as other tanks now”,
“fixed some smaller launch site models issues”,
“adjusted auto graphics quality detection thresholds in favor of more FPS”,
“changed LODBias on low preset from 1 to 0, so you are able to see highest detail mesh on low quality (might lead to more crashes on low end GPUs with little RAM)”,
“removed the often incorrect ping display on session entry in session search results”
],