SimplePlanes 2 | Crafts & Performance

The Demo is just around the corner! This will be the final dev blog before the demo goes live on October 27. This blog will be going over the stock crafts you'll be playing with, as well as some performance and quality of life changes.

Stock Crafts

The SimplePlanes 2 Flight Demo contains a variety of brand new stock crafts using the new goodies the game has to offer, with many more planned for the full release and potentially beyond.

These stock crafts have been lovingly made by a bunch of our playtesters, all under the management of Cody Cain, AKA Mod.

The selection of crafts in the Flight Demo includes:

• 8 Airplanes

• 4 Cars

• 3 Helicopters

These crafts are made by BaconAircraft, BaconEggs, Cody himself, crazyplaness, DeezDucks, dots, FairFireFlight, HuskyDynamics, MisterT, and ShizzleStyx, with even more people making some of the planned crafts for the release version. Each craft is made with a lot of care and love, with an occasional easter egg thrown around here and there reflecting the creator’s personal interests.

Before we show you the new crafts, here’s a brief introduction from Cody:

Hey y'all, I'm Cody otherwise known around the SP and JNO communities as "Mod" - neat nickname, I know. Anyways, I've been behind the scenes working together with Jundroo and the Playtesters as a craft manager/liason to build some of the coolest, most fun, and easiest to use stock craft you've ever put your hands on. It's been a journey from the start and I could not have done any of this without the playtesters' eagerness to build and help each other with their impressive builds using all the new features that SP2 brings to the table over SP1.

Less talk from me, here are a few images I've taken of some of the stock craft that will be available in the SP2 DEMO!

Going into each individual craft in the demo via text would be exhausting and not very entertaining, so please check out this overview video by Deep Space Industries, a long time friend of the dev team. They’ve put a lot of effort into this video and it contains nearly 14 whole minutes of gameplay going over each craft in the demo, so it’s worth checking out!

[dynamiclink href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NQMIKNqhzNY"]

Craft Loading

In our previous games, when you wanted to load a craft or make adjustments to your current one you had to back out of the flight scene and into the designer, having to reload the whole flight scene every time when you’re ready to use the new or updated craft.

In SimplePlanes 1 this wasn’t a huge issue on most modern hardware because there wasn’t much in the flight scene that needed to be loaded anyway so the load times were very quick, but it became significantly more annoying with Juno: New Origins, and in SP2 it would be worse not just because we have a lot more stuff to load than in SP1, but because we support multiplayer now which creates a whole other host of problems there.

So in SP2 we thought, “what if you could just load crafts or go back to the designer without unloading the flight scene?”. And so we put our finest coding wizards on the task, and now you can save, load, and download crafts without even having to go back to the designer, and if you do go back to the designer it won’t unload the flight scene,