Let me start by thanking each and every one of you who have purchased Lakehopper. My expectations have been greatly exceeded, and I feel very lucky and thankful. I'm so happy that so many of you are having fun with the game! Thank you for your feedback, questions, and bug reports. Keep 'em coming!
Today’s update is all about fixing some of the low-hanging fruit. There are more fixes and early improvements on the way. The biggest change has to do with how parts wear over time and how that affects plane performance. I knew I needed to do this change, but it didn’t quite make the cut for release. I’ve got a couple other small improvements, and some bugfixes that fix issues regarding rebinds, UI, and refueling.
Major Changes
Part Wear and Tear Changes
The part condition system has had a overall rebalance. That system has been active and working, taking into account how hard parts are being run, for how long they’ve been run, and if there are any loose bolts. (They don’t currently take crashes or high G-force flying into consideration… yet.)
For this rebalance, I’ve adjusted individual part lifespans, increasing the lifespan of most parts, especially structural parts without complex or moving components. Some parts have had their lifespans shorted slightly. This makes some parts durable, and some parts fragile. In particular, motor components wear faster, as do the fuel cell stacks in the power plant.
However, I’ve also greatly adjusted the curves that determine how well a part works over its lifespan. Overall, every part currently on your plane will perform better than it was before, even if I’ve reduced the lifespan. Below is an image that shows the old and new curves used to evaluate this.
Previously, a part would be reduced to 80% of its performance after 35% of its lifespan had been used. This was far too large a reduction in performance, far too fast, and well before any visual indications of wear were showing up.
With the new curve. parts retain 96% of their performance after 50% of their lifespan, and only drop to 80% after around 75% of their lifespan has passed. By this point, early visual signs of wear and tear will have already become apparent. Performance falloff is steeper when it happens, but your plane will retain its performance for much longer, even for parts that now wear faster.
For those interested in the math, the old curve is y = x^0.5, and the new one is y = 1 - 2^(-10 * x), x being the remaining percent of lifespan, y being the performance percentage.
There is definitely be more balancing to be done here, but I wanted to get this overall change out ASAP. I'll also be adding in-game documentation for the expected lifespan of different parts and the replacement intervals.
Improvements
Increased rope forces for both the player pulling on the plane and rope tension from tie-downs.
Added keybind setting for the held item modifier key (alt by default).
Holding this key allows you to rotate held parts, and using the scroll wheel, adjust how close they are held.
Allows for binding a controller button if desired.
Bugfixes
Fixed an issue where the Flaps Up secondary keybind was not detecting inputs from devices other than keyboard and mouse. Some other bindings received the same fix, so if you were having binding issues previously, this may fix them. There’s more work to do on peripheral support. This might fix some issues, but not all.
Fixed an issue with saving bindings for players in countries that use a comma instead of a period for the decimal separator in numbers. This was causing axis deadzone and invert settings to fail to be applied or saved for those players.
Fixed an issue where the hand pulled rope toggle flipped on and off instead of staying on or off.
Fixed many UI window issues on ultrawide monitors. Overall, the UI windows should be more consistent for everyone, but especially for ultrawide monitor users. (If you’re still seeing issues, send a screenshot and I’ll fix it!)
Fixed an issue where resetting the fuel nozzle while attached to the plane wouldn’t properly clear the refuel port.
Fixed an issue where the fuel nozzle would stay attached to your plane if it flew away from the refuel station. It will now reset to the station. (No more infinite fuel glitch, sorry!)
Happy skies!