New parts are probably as fun for us to create as they are for you to create with, but sometimes it makes sense to go back to the basics and re-evaluate some of the long-standing feedback that's been voiced by the community over the years. With career mode in the making, we decided it was about time to do these necessary tweaks for the game to feel as good as possible on the 1.0 release, having some time to get your feedback on all that is being added in 0.9.900.
Every time I've seen crafts break because of how the tinker panel was used I couldn't stop thinking about how that could have been prevented if there were no need for the tinker panel. In this update we are making most of the parts resizable, with price and mass changing according to the dimensions of the part, and many actual benefits from the size (larger electric motors being more powerful, larger cameras having a better zoom capability, larger ion engines and RCS having more power...
The parachutes have several new properties available in Part Properties to customize their size and behavior. There's also a new Drogue Chute in the part list that so many players have asked for.
Nathan has been busy polishing SR2 for those of you getting your new and shiny Steam Decks, with many under the hood improvements that we hope will make the game feel better on the deck, even if they aren't super noticeable for the rest of the players. One of the benefits for all of the platforms is that now, the control bindings should be way easier to config, but sadly, implementing this improvement means that all your existing bindings are going to be removed. We are really sorry for the annoyance but we want everyone to have the best experience possible.
One of the things we thought deserved some work before going full focus on Career Mode was the legs. We not only improved the ones we had, making them more stable and more procedural, but Kevin and Andrew worked on two new styles that, I think, are insanely cool.
Additionally, we thought that enough care was put into giving you excuses not to use the tinker panel again, and since we know you are not going to listen, we have enhanced it a bit, especially for those in mobile that can't enjoy the benefits of mods. We have ported the famous mod Overload made by Nicky, with better integration into the UI and some neat new features.
Lots of players want very different things, and although trying to please everyone is impossible, we have tried to bring some improvements to make everyone happy, from planet creators to Vizzy programmers, explorers and builders, role players, and those that like to see things explode. You can see this for yourself by checking the Release Notes.
Every change that comes with this update has a common goal: Career mode. We have been working hard deciding how to approach it and how we want the gameplay experience to be, trying to make it feel like it belongs in the game instead of just trying to get as close as possible to what other games have to offer already. Now that we have gotten rid of some of the most annoying rough edges we had we are going to go full focus on getting it right. We will try to make a couple more smaller updates in between for you to try some of the mechanics we want to have for the release of the game.