It's been a while since we started this beta! We had to deal with some bureaucratic hiccups we weren't expecting but we are finally on the clear :D Now onto what comes with 1.3, which is actually a lot.
As an ice breaker, something that can be often missed: With 1.3 we are bringing some big performance improvements, which will especially benefit large part count crafts. We have seen some cases that now run more than twice as fast! On top of improving performance, we have also done some quality of life improvements that although subtle, can have a great impact on gameplay, like overhauling the Rocket Engine exhaust damage, and the visuals of the exhausts.
Performance aside, the main focus of this update is overhauling the Career Mode experience:
- 15 unique rescue contracts across land, water, space... even on Luna's surface!
- A whole suite of Space Station contracts, providing you some prebuilt sections to use, while letting you shape the station however you want
- 6 new payloads to send to orbit and land on Droo's moons and a new payload to send on its journey to the stars
- Crew Bonuses, which will give you Tech Points if you complete some of the contracts while having crew aboard
- A rebalance of the contract tree, with adjusted prizes and an improved flow of contracts as you leave Droo's orbit
- A handful of new parameters to use in custom careers, for those that want to push the challenge further
A lot of the effort to get these contracts done started almost a year ago and we couldn't have done them without the help of a certain elementary particle, who has balanced his studies and an internship to bring to life some really cool crafts and payloads.
In order to embrace proceduralism even more we are pushing things up a notch with a new suite of tools for the designer that will let you change the curvature of the nosecones to whatever shape you want, clamp the fuselages to flatten their sides allowing for really complex shapes and use any symmetry amount.
We have also made it possible to customize the lift and drag curves of the wings to your liking, so you can simulate any wing profile, the internal jet engine properties so you can simulate any jet engine you can imagine, and rocket engine properties to let you define how many ignitions an engine can have.
Depth adds a lot of detail to your builds, but often when wanting to poke a hole the complexity of a craft balloons. An overhaul on the depth masks (the tech used for the landing gears to fake their gap) allows jet engines, rocket engines and RCS to still look hollow even if you push them into other parts. You will also be able to disable the depth mask to finally have transparent landing gear and cockpits.
Wings are also getting some love, now letting you attach things on their surface, having an option for auto-resize to ease having compound wings and getting smooth shapes, and with new default lift and drag curves based on xfoil simulations done by ourselves to ensure they are more accurate on a wider range of Angles of Attack.
Another great addition in this update is a new set of stock crafts focusing on land, water and air, to bring more diversity and serve as examples on how to build almost any type of vehicle in the game, from walking robots to helicopters without gyros, without using the tinker panel, cheats or complex Vizzy scripts.
We got the help of some of the best builders in the community, and although our standards for the stock crafts were high, they smashed them harder than anyone could have imagined.
- @ChuckNotChunk has proven how far the blades can go, with some surprisingly simple Vizzy scripts achieving the best Fly by Wire I've seen in the game
- @ChaoticGraviton thought making the new payloads and rescue crafts wasn't enough of a challenge and decided to make a bushplane with the help of @ExcaliburAerospace
- @ExcaliburAerospace himself reimagined the SimpleMartian rover and made a really cute submarine
- @Mostly designed a very peaceful drone
- @Spenzerointernational brought his top notch skills at making large planes with an impressive cargo plane
- @NebulaSpaceAgency took care of the cargo on the seas, with an enormous freighter
- @TN920 pulled of something crazy in record time, a walking sci-fi robot capable of traversing almost any terrain, with some of the smoothest animations ever
- And last but not least, @Mod decided to remake from scratch is SimpleOffroader and decided to add a Hypersonic Plane and a Rescue Vessel to the mix, now covering rockets, planes, boats and cars. Is there anything he can't build?
If you want to check out all that is new you can do so in the Release Notes.
PS: In case you haven't seen it yet, we have announced a new game!