After far too many late nights of caffeine-infused coding and 3D modeling, we are proud to present SimplePlanes VR . Strap a VR headset to your face and grab the stick and throttle in front of you to fly. Flip switches, push buttons, crank levers, slide throttles, and so much more. Download community-made aircraft without leaving the comfort of your VR headset. SimplePlanes VR is the most featu…
The Steam Winter Sale is here and you all know what that means! SimplePlanes is 50% off and SimpleRockets 2 is 15% off. We also put together a special bundle for all of you aerospace enthusiasts with an extra 15% discount. It's a great deal and I hope you check it out! Thanks for playing!
We are getting close to releasing SimpleRockets 2. We are close enough that we are ready to commit to actual date: November 8th. In the meantime, here's a new trailer to whet your appetite. Don't forget to add SimpleRockets 2 to your Steam Wishlist so you will receive a notification when it's released.
When you are building rockets, you're most likely going to run into the occasional rapid unscheduled disassembly. It happens to even the most experienced rocket surgeons. You might as well embrace it and take advantage of the opportunity and snag some spectacular photos. In addition to the visuals, we also improved the physics of the explosions quite a bit. Now larger fuel tanks will create muc…
We have recently started (secretly) beta testing SimpleRockets 2 for PC and Mac. We started with a very small group of people, just to ease into this and make sure nothing exploded, including our brains. So far we've had about 165 bug reports submitted and only Nathan's brain has exploded, so it's going well. We'd like to add a few more beta testers. If you are interested, please see our post h…
With rising fuel prices, we'd hate for you to waste your precious RP-1 guessing how to burn your engines to get where you want to go. In SimpleRockets 2, you can plan your burns by clicking on your current orbit and adding a Planned Burn. From there you can easily drag gizmos around to manipulate that burn and Map View will show the new, predicted orbit. It will also tell you exactly how long y…
The tyrannical Tsiolkovsky rocket equation cannot be avoided. The only way for rockets to accelerate in space is by expelling some of their mass. Most engines do this with combustion, which expels huge amounts of fuel mass at a respectable velocity. This gives great acceleration (and an impressive fireball), but very poor specific impulse. Specific impulse is like gas mileage for rocket engines…
The cargo bay will open the door to many possibilities. The most obvious being the space shuttle. There are many more possibilities, but it really hinges on your creativity. I know the creativity of our players is far greater than my own and I can't wait to see what you do with them. The cargo bay is our most complicated procedural part. It can be resized just like the fuel tank, so it can take…
We demoed SimpleRockets 2 at the Pixel Pop Festival in St Louis this weekend. Since many of you couldn't make it, we decided to make this video so you could have a virtual experience of our demo. Enjoy! Also, here are some pictures we took at the event.
The Nav Circle in SR1 made it very easy to control rockets in a 2D game. It took me a while to figure out the best way to extend the Nav Circle into three dimensions. I ended up with basically two nav circles: one for heading and one for pitch. The end result is now called the Nav Sphere and it makes controlling rockets in 3D extremely easy. The blue circle is for controlling the pitch of the r…
Kevin just finished redesigning the launch site. He also built a new hangar, extended the runway, and added two additional landing pads for those of you who want to be like Elon . With the effort invested in the new launch site, we didn't want to take any chances so we integrated some invisible sound suppression systems to protect the launch pads from the considerable acoustic force. Okay, that…
They said the Apollo 11 command module re-entered Earth's atmosphere at Mach 36 and temperatures of the air in front of the heat shield reached nearly 20,000° degrees Fahrenheit, which is well beyond the melting point of sanity. Today, I loaded up the latest build of SimpleRockets 2 with the new re-entry effects Philip and I have been working on and I hurtled my command pod at Smearth at nearly…
Our newest engine, the Apex I is an absolute beast. It's heavy, expensive, and drinks RP-1 like there's no tomorrow, but it will have the power to get even your most poorly engineered contraptions into space. It dwarfs the Mage I engine in size, power, and visuals. Here are the details: · Thrust: 3,200 kN · Mass: 3,500 kg · Price: $8,500,000 · Height: 4.2 m · Diameter: 3.0 m · Max Gimbal Angle:…
SimpleRockets 2 now has a coming soon page on Steam along with a new teaser trailer to entice you to come check it out! We're still shooting to release on Steam Early Access this summer. We plan to keep adding features and responding to player feedback until we feel the game is ready, at which point we will release the final version on all platforms at the same time. This includes iOS, Google P…
This past week I finished adding a new Photo Library feature to SR2. This makes it easy for players to take screenshots of their crafts at any time (in the designer or in flight) and use those screenshots when uploading their crafts and sandboxes . It also keeps track of when and where you took the photo and you can write a description if you're a fan of keeping a journal of your craft's journe…
*Note: Check the FAQ here before asking questions.* We've just completed development of the second engine in SR2. The Pixie engine is a much smaller alternative to the Mage engine with far better gas mileage. This makes it suitable for those second stages destined for Smoon. With an accordingly lower thrust, it is also a lot easier to land on a low-G planetary body without getting into an endle…
Last week I finished up implementing the fairings for SimpleRockets 2. Fairings are a great way to cover your sensitive belongings while you send them up to space. They are like the groin protectors of the aerospace industry. I designed the fairings in SR2 to be completely procedural, just like the fuselage pieces , so they can be resized and re-shaped into an infinite number of combinations. T…
Enjoy ;) . SimpleRockets 2 is currently under development. We are hoping to release on Steam Early Access in June. You can read more about our development here and also read our FAQ here .
I released a small update today. Here's what's included: · Fixed the OpenAL issue (hopefully) that prevented players from running the game. · Fixed a bug that caused the game to crash when pressing the DELETE key while moving a part in the editor · Fixed a bug that allowed the game to react to key presses while typing in the save mission dialog.
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Announcements are the developer’s own posts to the game’s Steam news feed: updates and their patch notes, in-game events, releases and sales. The important ones are marked on the players chart.