As you may have already seen, we have been collaborating with Linx to help him port his KSP mod "Parallax" into JNO. The mod is available here and it brings some jaw dropping visual enhancements to the game.
The two main areas where we have focused are the rocket engine exhausts and the procedural wings but there are more changes and improvements you can find in the Release Notes.
NEW EXHAUST
It has been more than 4 years since JNO got one of its signature features, the visual expansion of its plumes in procedural rocket engines. After this long it is easy to forget how ground-breaking that moment was, but since then the visuals lagged a bit behind and you sure let us know!
For this facelift we have decided not just to reimplement the visuals and logic behind this dynamic plumes, but also to hand you the wheel and let you choose how you want them to look with over a dozen properties to tweak the shape and color of the hottest part in your crafts.
PROCEDURAL WINGS
Jundroo is well known for its love for airplanes, but we have always received complaints about how un-aerodynamic our wings look. Players have been forced to tinker with the physics of wings to hide them within fuel tanks in an unnecessarily complicated process, but that ends with 1.2.
Wings have had different physics airfoils in the game forever, that realistically model how the wing would behave, but now that also comes with a visual companion, making it easy to identify what type of airfoil the wing is using and what face is pointing up. No more flat bottom tail wings! And if you aren't happy with those, we have exposed all the parameters that define their shape in the hidden properties, so you can recreate whatever aircraft you want.
VARIOUS IMPROVEMENTS
Maybe not as obvious as the previous two, but to continue with the idea of the facelift we have bumped up the visual fidelity in space by including an Ultra setting to the atmospheres, increasing by 8 times their precision and thus reducing their sawtooth artifacts, and also by accounting for the terrain slopes in the generation of the Scaled Space textures on Very High cubemap settings and above.
And to help you fly through the mountains to gasp at how amazing Parallax looks, we have also brought the Mouse Joystick feature from SimplePlanes, so you can smoothly sail the air even without a controller.
