SimplePlanes 2 news & patch notes

Greetings! Today the Steam Summer Sale begins, where all of our games are on sale! SimplePlanes 2 is 10% off, and our other games are a whopping 75% off!

To celebrate the occasion, we've prepared a big new update for y'all to beta test: Procedural Landing Gear!

Please note: This is a big update, and as such you enter the beta at your own risk. Crafts may break despite our best efforts. Crafts saved in this beta will NOT be loadable in older versions of the game, even if they don't use new parts!

Because of the risk, this beta is in a new "landing_gear" branch so that you won't auto-update if you're opted in to the regular beta branch.

HOW TO PLAY THE BETA: 1. Right click SimplePlanes 2 in your Steam library 2. Click on Properties 3. Click on Game Versions & Betas 4. In the version list, click "landing_gear"

Those of you who've been with us for a while may think of the procedural landing gear we added to Juno quite some time ago, but we've cooked up something far more powerful, offering a HUGE amount of customization while still remaining user-friendly. If you want to just read the patch notes you can go here (or skip to the bottom of this post if you're reading this on Steam), but if you want to get a rundown of how the new gear works read on!

Gear Leg

The leg is the heart of your landing gear, with multiple different types ranging from slim fighter jet nose legs to bulky airliner rear legs, and many ways to customize them. Add a support strut, a torque link, and more! The suspension is customizable very similarly to the double wishbone suspension, so you can tune the physics to your liking.

You can also add the new and improved Bay part to give it a place to stay in, featuring customizable door options at long last! There's a new part welding feature that'll let you easily keep the bay and landing gear stuck together.

Wheel Assembly

The wheel assembly is much like a regular wheel, except it has a frame to conveniently attach to a leg, fuselage, or wing. There are a variety of styles to choose from that cover all sorts of landing gear configurations, and like a normal wheel you can customize the tires, treads, rim, and more to get things looking how you want them to.

Possibly the coolest thing about this though is what happens when you move the wheel. Use the translation tool to nudge the wheel around and you'll see the leg effortlessly adapt its shape to reach the wheel, its mechanical bits working as best they can to make a convincing piece of landing gear!

Animation Editor

These parts are cool and all, but there's one more really powerful tool at your disposal now: the Animator tab. Real-life landing gear works in a variety of mysterious and unique ways depending on the aircraft, with the gear often not simply extending or collapsing in a strictly linear way.

So, in the Gear Leg's part properties, you can set keyframes to animate the entire extension/retraction process yourself without fiddling with individual pistons and rotators that need relatively complex input setups.

The Animator can be as simple or as complex as you want. For a very simple animation you can simply have one keyframe on one end where the wheel is positioned downwards and another keyframe on the other end where the wheel is tucked inside the bay, or you can make it more complicated by adding any number of keyframes in between where the strut, support strut, doors, and wheel are all doing their own things. If you want to take things even further, the animation is based on the leg's current input which is just set to the landing gear button by default, but you can use custom inputs to do even more. The potential of this tool is immense, and we're very curious to see what you all will do with it.

Feedback

The core of the system is in place and we're really happy with how it's come together. Let us know about any obvious bugs, pain points or rough edges in the workflow, and suggestions for new gear leg and wheel assembly styles. We're also keen for feedback on how the gear feels — the mass, suspension, and physics — so let us know if something seems off and what kind of aircraft you noticed it on.

Thank you for playing, let us know what you think!

v0.7.05

New Location unlocked! Say hello to the Coughinton Refinery!

We've added a brand-new, modular landing gear system built around three new parts: the Wheel Assembly, the Gear Leg, and the Gear Bay. Because they're separate parts, you're free to mix and match them however you like.

Wheel Assembly

Built on the same new wheel physics as our other new wheels, with a style option to cycle through configurations: single, dual, tandem, and multi-wheel bogies (quad and six-wheel). The assembly steers for taxiing, and since it's its own part you can pair it with our gear legs or drop it onto your own custom-built landing gear exactly like you always have — now with far more capable bogies to build with.

Gear Leg

A suspension leg designed to work hand-in-hand with the Wheel Assembly. We've included several prebuilt styles, with tunable suspension (travel, spring, damping), and procedural sizing. Support struts and the torque link bend and follow along automatically as the gear extends, retracts, and steers. And retraction runs on a completely new and very robust keyframe animation system, giving you full control over how your gear folds away — including complex animations across the leg, wheels, support struts, and bay doors.

Gear Bay

Drops onto a fuselage and automatically carves a clean hole with matching procedural bay doors (fuselages only for now — wing holes aren't supported yet). Sculpt its shape freely — depth, height, width, and taper, by dragging handles or typing exact values — or flip on Auto Size and let it wrap itself around your gear leg's retracted footprint. Choose from single or double door styles, animate it all on the same keyframe system as the rest of your gear, and link several bays onto one shared timeline for a symphony of complex landing gear mayhem.

Environment

• Added a new location in the Vetusta island, the Coughinton Refinery

• Added new runway lights to the Bannock Station

• Added a new SAR hangar and office building in the Bannock Station, and labels to identify all the buildings there

• Improved most of the bridges found around the islands

Parts

• Allowed base pylon attach points to manually connect to multiple parts

• Removed non-powertrain seek behavior for the propeller assembly

• Improved the performance of label parts

• Fixed text decals sizing incorrectly in the flight scene

• Fixed an issue where crafts would fail to load if decals referenced missing part IDs

• Fixed an issue preventing SimplePlanes 1 crafts with legacy detacher parts from loading

UX / UI

• Changed refueling drogue activations to use a dropdown menu

• Prevented the user interface from hiding when taking screenshots for bug reports

• Fixed spinner properties preventing adjustment to their minimum or maximum values

• Fixed the menu incorrectly switching to multiplayer settings when spawning an AI in a multiplayer server

Physics

• Improved the physics behavior of wheels when disconnected from a craft

• Fixed an issue where wheels without suspension would constantly lose contact with the ground

• Fixed explosive weapons disappearing when underwater

• Fixed afterburners failing to turn off after oxygen deprivation

• Fixed an issue with NaN values in jet engine calculations

• Fixed Chad teleporting to a destroyed craft when seated in a separated part

Misc

• Added support for welding and grouping parts together in the designer to move as a single unit

• Fixed the undo function not correctly reverting craft instructions in the designer

• Fixed an issue where Overload would shift parts when applying changes

• Fixed craft properties not including disconnected parts

• Fixed an issue where a corrupted control settings file could prevent the game from starting

• Fixed an issue preventing players from leaving the flight scene under certain conditions

SimplePlanes 2 version 0.7.4.0 is now live! This update focuses on improving the multiplayer experience, giving the host and other players more tools to curate their space.

Server Settings

There are now a number of new server settings the host can access, including the ability to finally set a server description! A server description allows you to write rules and expectations for your server, which players will be able to read in the server browser and in-game. Or you can just write something silly, up to you!

As the host, once you've made your server, in the new multiplayer settings menu there are a couple of new settings to help promote a more even playing field if you want to. In addition to the existing settings for tick rate, part count, and peaceful mode, you can now disable both the teleport up/down hotkeys (how many of you even know about those, I wonder?), as well as the ability to teleport to other players. You can also change the description in-case a troll made you realize you forgot to add a certain rule... Other players in the server will be able to see these rules in a read-only format in the multiplayer settings menu, where they can also access the craft copying toggle.

Vote Kick

If the host is AFK or otherwise unresponsive and somebody in the server is being a troublemaker, players can now start a vote to kick said troublemaker via the player list at any time. When a vote kick is started, all players will get a pop up to vote. If the majority of players vote yes, the guilty player is banished to the void. To limit abuse, there is a cooldown between vote kicks, so when one concludes you'll have to wait to start another.

0.7.04.0

FEATURES

• Added a multiplayer vote-kick system.

• Added a description/message property to multiplayer servers on server creation and viewable in the server browser.

• Renamed the 'Server Settings' panel to 'Multiplayer Settings' and now allow multiplayer clients to view the settings as read-only. This will auto-open for clients when joining the server. Added the server name and description to the multiplayer settings panel.

• Added server settings to disable the teleport up/down functionality as well as the teleport to player functionality.

• Moved the 'allow copy craft' toggle from the game settings to the multiplayer settings panel.

• The server browser should now automatically filter out server on incompatible game versions.

BUG FIXES

• Fixed bug with confusing Range and Speed slider label displays in hinge rotator....

• Fixed bug where propeller and hub style dropdown lists were swapped in Overload.

As always, thank you for playing! We have plenty more updates to come, check out our ROADMAP to see what we're working on, and vote for what you want in the future!

v0.7.03.200

Multiplayer

• Added the ability to disable multiplayer chat via the game settings
• Added a button in the player list to block chat with individual players
• Updated multiplayer chat to support clickable SimplePlanes website links while removing other external links
• Removed rich text formatting support from multiplayer chat

UX / UI

• Added a pending new row automatically in Overload when changes are applied
• Added a lock icon next to undiscovered activities in the Select Activity dialog
• Added a Default option to the Overall Quality spinner in the settings menu
• Fixed an issue causing NaN errors when dragging a fuselage or wing gizmo aligned with the view
• Fixed an issue where the camera recenter function did not work in cockpit view

Physics

• Prevented airborne wheels from accelerating to infinite angular velocities to fix related game crashes
• Fixed an issue where ignored intersecting parts could inappropriately collide
• Fixed a game crash caused by the glass shatter effect in rare cases
• Fixed an error in helicopter main rotor precomputed lift calculations

Parts

• Removed legacy jet engine nozzles from being loaded or selected in Overload
• Fixed the collider position on the radial engine
• Fixed an issue where using a burner temperature of zero degrees resulted in NaN engine thrust

Misc

• Included the current editor craft XML file during game autosaves
• Fixed an issue where toggling player activation groups would unintentionally affect local AI crafts

Update 0.7.3.1 is now LIVE on Steam! This update includes the highly requested Overload XML editor, plus a number of UI improvements, bug fixes, and more! You can find the full patch notes at the end of this post, but let's talk about the star of the show:

Overload

Being by far the most-requested feature on our Roadmap, Overload is now fully integrated into the stock game, allowing you to directly edit the XML properties of your craft from in-game like the SP1 pros did.

As Overload is an advanced feature that can overwhelm players or break parts, it isn't enabled by default. To enable it, go to your game settings, scroll to Designer, and enable "Overload XML Editor". Then you can simply select a part in the designer and click the new wrench button in the bottom right of the screen and get to work!

Overload is a powerful tool that lets you modify part properties beyond their normal values, change a part's scale, its mass, drag, collisions, add new properties, and so much more. You can think of it like a cheat menu of sorts. Want a car engine with 20 (or... more?) cylinders? You can do that! The world's tiniest rotator? No problem! It's both fun to play around with and very valuable to more experienced players with an eye for detail. The possibilities are endless, but please be careful as it's easy to accidentally break the game with this much power.

Have fun!

The Road Ahead

In-case you haven't been keeping up, we have a Roadmap on our website with a list of things we plan to add to the game ("Prospects"), and things we want to look into if there's enough community interest ("Wishlist"). You have 7 votes to divvy out among these, so tell us what you want! You can also put out your own suggestions here, and of course there's the in-game bug report tool for when you've encountered something that isn't quite right (we've fixed about 75 bugs in the past month thanks to your bug reports!)

Overload is just the first step. Next on our list is procedural landing gear, so look forward to that sometime in the near future! We are building this game with you, the community. Your feedback is invaluable to helping us make sure we stick the landing for the eventual 1.0 release, so keep it coming!

Thank you again for playing SP2 and helping us with development. We hope you enjoy the update <3

v0.7.03.101

Overload is finally here! You can enable it in Settings -> Game -> Designer.

Multiplayer

• Prevent ARM missiles from locking onto other players who have their targeting systems disabled

• Fixed a bug where remote crafts would sometimes spawn with incorrectly scaled parts

• Fixed a bug where pressing 'H' in the chat while attached to the carrier catapult would inadvertently launch the craft

• Fixed a bug preventing players from joining a multiplayer game via a Steam invite or the friends list if the server was password protected or if the player was not currently in the main menu

Parts

• Tweaked the mass of propeller assemblies to scale more accurately with diameter and added extra mass for the Auto Blade Control type

• Fixed propeller engines revving too high at low speeds and generating excessive thrust

• Fixed an issue with wheel physics when wheel parts were rotated

• Fixed a bug where text decals would scale improperly with part scale, resolving scaling issues on procedural missiles

• Adjusted decal render priority to automatically update when a decal is attached to another decal

• Fixed a bug where decals could stop rendering after long play sessions with frequent craft loading

• Fixed a bug where decal parts could not be properly hidden

• Fixed a bug where the fuselage length gizmo would incorrectly position mirrored fuselages that had been rotated

• Fixed a bug where fowler flaps on mirrored and bent wings would animate incorrectly

• Fixed several rendering bugs related to which face of SP1 glass fuselages hides when they are placed up against each other

• Fixed a bug where the "sync connected" toggle would not work on the slice between a hollow and non-hollow fuselage

• Fixed bug where missile fins would collide with the players aircraft

UX / UI

• Added the Overload in-game XML editor!

• Allowed pressing the up and down arrow keys to cycle through options in dropdown lists

• Added support for negative tags in the load craft panel to easily exclude specific groups like autosaves or stock crafts

• Added a message to the fuselage shape panel advising players to hold shift or alt to change the behavior of the gizmos

• Adjusted the wind settings dialog to accurately display wind speed in the player's currently selected units

• Fixed a bug where the drag visualization animation would freeze when the game was paused

• Fixed a bug where the Altitude AGL measurement did not consider the road layer

• Fixed a bug where the hand preview would sometimes remain visible during flight

Symmetry

• Improved the Symmetry Panel to help players identify and fix issues where symmetry fails to work on their crafts

• Adjusted the designer to automatically open the symmetry panel and display a warning when the mirror plane changes or when symmetry fails under certain conditions

• Added a designer warning message when attempting to attach mirrored parts to a non-mirrored part slightly off the mirror plane

• Fixed a bug where enabling symmetry on a group of parts could fail for parts symmetrically linked with invalid symmetry

• Fixed a bug where the symmetry button failed to update when attaching a part automatically disabled symmetry

Misc

• Adjusted the game to automatically restore stock and required crafts during initialization if all craft files have been manually deleted

• Fixed a bug with the developer console commands used for restoring stock crafts

• Fixed a bug where ramps would disappear while in First Person View

• Fixed a bug where a craft could be incorrectly marked as critically damaged after firing its own missiles

• Fixed an issue where center of mass, lift, and thrust gizmos would inadvertently appear in orthographic craft images

v0.7.2.201

UX / UI

• Added configurable quick-save and auto-save functionality for designer crafts
• Added support for cloning parts with the translate tool by holding CTRL while dragging a gizmo
• Changed Funky Trees dropdown name to Custom Input and added information to the input dialog
• Added an option to stop showing the Designer Tutorial flyout when there are incomplete tutorials
• Fixed subdirectory handling issues when renaming crafts in the load craft panels
• Fixed a bug where renaming a craft into a non-existent subdirectory would fail
• Added automatic backup of the current editor craft to a crash backup file when the game restarts after a crash
• Added the part ID to part properties
• Fixed activation group inputs on various parts failing to save Custom Input expressions and converted them to use dropdown controls
• Fixed previewed attach point connections being missed upon dropping a part

Powertrain

• Adjusted the auto blade pitch governor to target a constant RPM instead of scaling with throttle
• Fixed propellers applying forward thrust even when rotating in reverse
• Fixed a powertrain free-energy bug when using a differential with a propeller assembly and a free spinning wheel
• Changed the names of jet engine nozzles
• Fixed propeller assembly mass being substantially higher when using Manual Blade Control
• Fixed incorrect mirror rotation on the Transfer Case part

Physics

• Fixed instances where physics calculations could break due to invalid data
• Prevented invalid wings that failed generation from corrupting mass, CoM, or CoL calculations
• Fixed game crashes caused by invalid wing input data by aborting wing generation
• Fixed game crashes from precision errors during fuselage collider generation
• Fixed crafts suddenly losing weapon ammo when disengaging the parking brake

Parts

• Fixed the fuselage upgrader failing to correctly update the rise for old nose cones
• Fixed the fuselage upgrade utility not preserving hollow thickness
• Fixed the slice size gizmo moving the wrong end of symmetric fuselages
• Fixed incorrect shading on missile nose cones

Misc

• Fixed the name of the Cochran Airport 04L starting location
• Fixed differential connection error messages displaying for all players instead of just the craft owner
• Fixed blueprints not working on Macs with Intel CPUs

Hello everyone! SimplePlanes 2 has been out for a few days now, and today we’ve just released our first patch, v0.7.2, which re-adds the missing bug report button and fixes some bugs y’all have uncovered in your time playing. (Note: all players in a multiplayer lobby must be playing the same version of the game as each other!)

Make Your Voice Heard!

If you don’t know, we have a ROADMAP on our website that includes a growing list of things we plan to add to the game in future updates, or things we are at least thinking about. You get 7 votes that you can freely distribute to any of the listed items. We encourage you to use all of your votes!

The Prospects section contains things we are planning to include in future updates, with your votes helping us figure out what to prioritize. The Wishlist section contains stuff we would like to add, but aren’t certain if we can; votes in the Wishlist section help us figure out if there’s enough community interest to make an idea worth attempting, but we still make no guarantees it will work out. We want to incorporate community feedback throughout this game’s development, and we really value all of your input. And speaking of the community...

Thank you!!!

SimplePlanes 2 has been the best PC launch we’ve ever had, reaching 1063 peak concurrent players on Steam this past Saturday, breaking the record of 885 concurrent players that the original SimplePlanes set 10 whole years ago. We really can’t thank you all enough for playing and enjoying SP2. We’ve poured our hearts into it for years, and it’s been so amazing seeing that work pay off in such a fantastic way. This is only the beginning of our early access journey, and we can’t wait to discover what the future holds with you all <3

Anyway, here are those patch notes:

v0.7.1 & v0.7.2

Bug Fixes

• Added Submit Bug Report button to designer and flight menu flyouts

• Fixed a bug where the craft list panels were sorting craft by their display name instead of their file name

• Fixed bug where powertrain parts connected to non-powertrain parts could cause the game to become unresponsive on craft load

• Fixed a crash on MacOS when attempting to spawn a craft for which a craft XML file could not be found

• Fixed a bug were screenshots for bug reports and craft uploads would fail on Windows with HDR enabled

• Fix physx collider errors on wings where control surfaces are adjacent to bends

• Fixed a bug that could cause the train locomotive to show up in unexpected places for a frame or two when it spawns (in single player or a multiplayer server)

• Prevent AI spawn panel from showing or randomly spawning undiscovered hidden crafts

• Renaming a craft now also updates the craft's name in its XML

Misc

• Added a designer basics tutorial step about the single part modifier key

• Most tutorial steps now wait for the primary mouse button to no longer be held down before completing

• Fixed a bug with missing text on the camera step of the designer basics tutorial running on Steam Deck

• Fixed a bug in the prop plane tutorial that prevented moving to previous steps once about half of the tutorial was completed

• Added additional people to the credits

The wait is over! SimplePlanes 2 has officially cleared for takeoff on Steam! We’ve spent years rebuilding the game from the ground up to give you more power, more realism, and a whole new playground.

For the first two weeks you can get SimplePlanes 2 on Steam with a 10% Launch Discount!

What’s New?

We know many of you have hangars full of history. That’s why SimplePlanes 2 is compatible with the 1,000,000+ crafts from the original game, bringing your legacy builds into a new world, shaded with the much improved lighting and ready to get some of the new decals slapped on them!

We have new toys!

Jet Engines, Propellers, and Combustion Engines are now fully procedural to fit your specific design. It's not just visuals, the new procedural powertrain system comes with many parts to mold to anything you can imagine. This overhaul includes a new set of wheels with dozens of rims and trims and greatly improved physics. You no longer have to build your craft around a part; you build the part to fit your craft.

More Detail, Less Effort

We’ve overhauled the visual fidelity of the wings and fuselages so your creations look amazing right out of the box. Say goodbye to paneling thanks to a new Hole Carving tool that lets you easily create custom weapon bays, cockpits, and windows. Attach and resize the new Control Surfaces to the wings and have them seamlessly fit into their accurate NACA wing profile.

Major Chad & Co.

Jump into a server with your friends to race, dogfight, or just cruise the archipelago together, or explore community lobbies to flex your coolest creations on some randoms. With Major Chad you can also step out of the cockpit to explore the world on foot and crack some dances. He will also try to grab the controls while in flight, no more telekinesis on the joystick!

A Vast Archipelago

The new environments feature 787 square kilometers of detailed terrain, including motorways, trails, streets and roads to drive on. With volumetric clouds, realistic water, multiple airports, racetracks, a city, a power plant... plus dozens of hidden crafts scattered across the islands for you to discover, there is more to see than ever before.

So Much More

There are countless Quality of Life improvements across the game, like the Designer Gizmos, the new Drag Visualizer, customizable Designer Environments, a better UI, improved sounds, a new soundtrack... the list goes on. We’ve packed in so many things that we can’t list them all here, but finally, you can jump into the cockpit to explore all of them!

The Road Ahead: Early Access & Feedback

We’ve worked hard to make SP2 the best it can be, but there were a few things we weren’t able to get to before launching. That is why after 3 public Demos we decided to go into Early Access, so you can help us continue shaping the game into the masterpiece of our dreams, your feedback is the fuel that keeps us going!

We are working on a Roadmap to better show you where we are and what are our top priorities while letting you express what are yours, as well as a Feedback Forum so you can let us know if we forgot anything! You'll notice there are no dates or timelines, from our experience, game development is highly unpredictable. We'd rather take the time to get a feature right than rush it out broken just to hit an arbitrary deadline.

Help Us Take Off

To make the upgrade to SP2 even easier, we’ve launched several Steam bundles. If you already own our previous games you will automatically get an additional discount to your purchase of SimplePlanes 2 through the SimplePlanes Collection (10% off), the Aerospace Engineer Bundle (15% off), and the SP2 + Soundtrack bundle (10% off). If you didn't have some of our other games, this is also the perfect chance to try them out!

As a small team in this algorithm driven era, positive reviews on Steam are one of the most important factors in our success during launch week. They help our presence on the storefront, ensuring new pilots can find us, helping us fund the development of new parts and features. If you’re enjoying the game, please consider taking a moment to leave your thoughts on our Steam page; it makes a massive difference and we read every single one.

Thank you for being part of this journey for over a decade. We can’t wait to see what you build next.

- The Jundroo Team

SimplePlanes 2 is now releasing April 23rd

After we announced that we're releasing on April 28th we had kind of an awkward realization that s&box, a spiritual successor to Garry's Mod, was also releasing on the 28th. This is good news for all manner of sandbox game players, but given that SP2 is itself a sandbox game and therefore the two games have an overlapping target audience, we're worried launching on the same day as them could throw a wrench in our marketing efforts for release considering our smaller following.

So! After some deliberation, we decided you all will get to play the game early! So I guess that means we're... reverse delaying the game? Weird.

Anyway, that's only three days from now as of writing this. April 23rd, at 12:00 PM CT.

We'll see you there :)

Hey everyone! You’ve read the title already (I assume…) so let’s cut to the chase:

SimplePlanes 2 is releasing into Early Access on April 28th!!

Fun fact: this is almost exactly two years after we posted our initial announcement trailer, which released on April 26th 2024. The game has come a very long way since then, and we’re really excited for you all to finally get to see first-hand what we’ve been working on for the past few years. 

The game will be releasing on April 28th at **12 PM Central Time**, and will cost **$19.99 USD** plus a **10% launch discount down to $17.99 USD** if you get it within 14 days after release. We’re planning to gradually raise the price as we add more content throughout Early Access, so if you get it early you’ll be getting a neat discount. That being said, while we’re proud of the current state of the game, don’t be afraid to wait until full release if Early Access isn’t your thing; we understand!

If you haven’t already, please consider wishlisting the game!

You’ll be notified as soon as the game releases, and it also helps us a lot.

Thank you all so much for your patience and support, it’s been so inspiring to see your enthusiasm for this game and we hope that what we’ve made will be worth the wait. Not too long now, we’ll see you in two weeks! <3

Hello again, we hope you all have been having fun with the new demo this past week! Today marks the beginning of Steam Next Fest, a week-long event run by Valve where thousands of game developers publish demos of their upcoming games, and we're happy to announce that we're participating!

If you haven't already tried the demo, head on over to the SimplePlanes 2 Demo Steam page and you can simply download it and play. Now's the perfect time to jump in, as you're sure to find new people to play with!

If you're new here and are only just now learning about SimplePlanes 2, welcome! Here's a rundown of what you can expect in this demo:

• Limited Designer

  • Part properties, such as the procedural car engines, can be modified; allowing you to tune the performance of the stock crafts to your liking.

  • Parts cannot be added, moved, or removed. Wings and fuselages are also unable to be reshaped.

  • The paint tool can be used and decals can be edited, allowing you to personalize the stock crafts or bring new life into your old SP1 crafts with new textures.

• Limited Map

  • Driftwood Island, a small island densely packed with points of interest including a private airport with a whole race track going through it.

  • Bannock Station, a militarized area on the southern-most end of the map featuring a military base, a power plant, and docks.

  • Daland Airport, a little rural airport on Vetusta Island just west of Driftwood.

• Multiplayer

  • Multiplayer is fully functional, allowing you to hang out with your friends and do activities such as races together.

• Stock Crafts

  • A ton of stock crafts are available to load and play with, made by our playtesters, ranging from fighter jets to racecars, utility helicopters, and more!

Bug Reports

When you encounter a bug, please use the in-game bug report button to tell us what happened. It’s the little bug icon in the pause menu. Bug reports submitted this way give us various files such as your log file that help us a lot with deducing what went wrong.

If you’d like to discuss the demo with other players, or find people to play with, please consider joining our Discord Server! There are a lot of friendly people there who’d love to play.

Thanks for playing! Your support means the world to us, and we're working very hard to make a game that's worthy of that support <3

Hello again! I think it’s about time for another SimplePlanes 2 demo, don’t you? Since the start of this year we’ve been hard at work on our biggest demo by far, and you can play it starting right now until March 2nd! This demo features both Driftwood Island and Bannock Station from the previous two demos, plus a new location, unlocked part properties, and more!

HOW TO PLAY

To play this demo, head on over to our shiny new SimplePlanes 2 Demo Steam page and click “Install Demo”. You’ll then see “SimplePlanes 2 Demo” in your Steam library and you can get straight to playing!

What To Expect

As with the previous demos, this demo offers a limited experience compared to the full game. However, as mentioned earlier, this time around we’re giving you a lot more to do! Here’s a neat list of what is and isn’t present:

• Limited Designer

  • Part properties, such as the procedural car engines, can be modified; allowing you to tune the performance of the stock crafts to your liking.

  • Parts cannot be added, moved, or removed. Wings and fuselages are also unable to be reshaped.

  • The paint tool can be used and decals can be edited, allowing you to personalize the stock crafts or bring new life into your old SP1 crafts with new textures.

• Limited Map

  • Driftwood Island, a small island densely packed with points of interest including a private airport with a whole race track going through it.

  • Bannock Station, a militarized area on the southern-most end of the map featuring a military base, a power plant, and docks.

  • Daland Airport, a previously unannounced rural airport on Vetusta Island just west of Driftwood.

• Multiplayer

  • Multiplayer is fully functional, allowing you to hang out with your friends and do activities such as races together.

• Stock Crafts

  • A ton of stock crafts are available to load and play with, made by our playtesters. A bunch of new ones have been added since the last demo; so many that I don’t even know exactly how many there are anymore!

Bug Reports

When you encounter a bug, please use the in-game bug report button to tell us what happened. It’s the little bug icon in the pause menu. Bug reports submitted this way give us various files such as your log file that help us a lot with deducing what went wrong.

If you’d like to discuss the demo with other players, or find people to play with, please consider joining our Discord Server! There are a lot of friendly people there who’d love to play.

As always, we hope you have fun <3

Hey everyone! We hope you’ve been enjoying the demo, it’s been awesome seeing you playing (and breaking) it this past week. We’ve got a bit of an impromptu SimplePlanes 2 blog post here for you today. Normally we post dev blogs dedicated to multiple related topics at a time, but this time it’s just focused on one topic, and it’s one we think a lot of you are going to be very excited about.

Recently, we did a livestream on our YouTube channel where we messed around in the demo, doing races and stuff – if you missed that, click here for the VOD. The topic of this blog post was announced and shown off during that stream, so if you watched that you already know what’s coming.

The Problem

One of the most part-intensive aspects of many SimplePlanes builds is stuff like custom landing gear bays, internal weapon bays for things like stealth jets, windows for airliners, and many more things of a similar nature. They take up so many parts because you need to manually make the hole you want using multiple fuselages which could quickly get out of hand depending on what you were going for. Modern fuselage features like fuselage slicing, introduced in SP1 version 1.11, plus the community’s ever-growing skill, help to minimize the part requirements for these things, but they still require more parts and effort than they ought to.

So… what’s the solution? Well, this question was actually kind of answered in the fuselage slicing post I just linked to if you read closely, but that answer was dismissed at the time because it just wasn’t feasible to implement. However, SP2’s fuselages are rebuilt from scratch, so the impossible now seems not only possible but very feasible. So without further ado, here’s a window into what Nicky has been working on:

Hole Cutting

As it turns out, the solution to holes in fuselages taking a lot of parts is to just… let you cut a hole into a fuselage. Through what I can only imagine to be the same kind of dark wizardry we’ve all come to expect from him, Nicky has added “boolean cutting” to the fuselages in SP2. This means that, with just one invisible little box, you can carve chunks out of a fuselage’s geometry. This doesn’t use any “negative space” rendering fakery like the procedural landing gear from Juno: New Origins; this creates an actual hole in the fuselages with an option to automatically turn the piece you just cut out into a door or even a window. In other words, those landing gear bays, weapon bays, and windows I mentioned? You’ll be able to do those without any extra fuselages, opening the door (heh) for new players to much more easily create crafts with complicated geometry, but also for more skill expression for experienced players. It’s an incredibly powerful feature that the team is super excited about, and we can’t wait to see what you all do with it. Note though that as of writing this, the fuselage’s hitbox isn’t changed when you cut holes into it, however this may change by the time the game is out.

That’s all for today, consider this an early Christmas present! We’re going on our holiday break now, and we’ll get back to work on the game in January. Happy Holidays and have fun with the demo!

Surprise!! With the holiday season now upon us and the ten year anniversary of SimplePlanes 1’s release on Steam coming up on December 17th, we’ve released another SimplePlanes 2 demo (or playtest, whichever you’d rather call it) for you to try that you can play RIGHT NOW, featuring an all-new area, new stock crafts, and more! This second demo will be available all month long, ending on January 5th, 2026, giving you a whole three weeks to play a limited version of SimplePlanes 2 by yourself, with friends, or with random people.

The very keen-eyed among you may have noticed a peculiar image in our most recent dev blog on our website, with hidden text saying “I AM CHAD”. Clicking that image took you to a secret teaser video (sorry, the hidden link didn't work on Steam), and the file name of that image, 12.15.png, actually revealed the release date of this demo. If you noticed that, congratulations! I have no specific prize for you, just know that your observational skills make me happy.

HOW TO JOIN

To join the demo, go to the SimplePlanes 2 Steam page and click the “Join the Playtest” button in the playtest box. The game will automatically be added to your Steam library so you can just download it and start playing!

What To Expect

The demo is a limited slice of the SimplePlanes 2 experience, limiting you to a specific portion of the map, and a read-only designer where you can only load crafts, paint them, and edit their decals (if applicable). In other words, you cannot build crafts yet, but you can edit their paint scheme to use all of the new textures and stuff in SP2. Multiplayer is here and fully functional, as are a host of activities to play, so go wild!

Bug Reports

If (and let’s be honest, when) you encounter a bug, please use the in-game bug report button to tell us what happened. It’s the little bug icon in the pause menu. Bug reports submitted this way give us various files such as your log file that help us a lot with deducing what went wrong.

What’s New in Demo 2

Compared to Demo 1, a number of things are different and we’re gonna lay out some of the more important changes here.

• An all-new playable area

  • Rather than Driftwood Island, Demo 2 places you on the south of New Yoke island, allowing you to play in the location we showed off in our latest blog post, including a power plant, port, a military base, a train, and more. This location has more playable airspace, in particular there is significantly more playable area out towards the sea, hopefully giving you more room to breathe with faster and less maneuverable crafts like the Stormvark.

• The USS Beast II has come to visit

  • The USS Beast II, our state-of-the-art aircraft carrier, is now inside the playable area and can be landed on, sunken, or whatever else you feel like.

  • A quick note: there was supposed to be a spawn location so you can easily spawn on one of its catapults, but we accidentally broke that so it’s not there. For now, if you want to spawn on the Beast, you’ll have to land on it and create a custom spawn location.

• Many new stock crafts

  • Loads of new stock crafts have been added by our internal playtesters, ranging from supermaneuverable thrust vectoring fighter jets to civilian propeller planes to racecars. The name of each craft’s creator is included in the craft instructions.

• New propeller engines

  • The propeller-powered stock crafts from Demo 1 have been updated to utilize our new procedural propeller engines, featuring better sounds and more realistic flight performance, among other things. All of the new propeller crafts use these as well, with the exception of the Vogel and Peanut.

• Performance has been greatly improved

  • Performance (framerate), especially in multiplayer, was a major complaint in Demo 1 and we’ve spent a lot of the time between then and now working on making it better. Although there is still a lot of work to be done on that front, we’ve made a lot of progress that we hope you’ll notice.

  • On top of framerate we’ve spent a lot of time optimizing the networking, to hopefully offer you a smoother experience in multiplayer. That being said, we haven't managed to fully contain the chaos of random trolls, so we’ve decided to limit public lobbies to 10 people in order to reduce the chances of people unexpectedly running into a slideshow, while still allowing for private lobbies to have 16 players.

We really hope you all have fun with this demo! When you’ve played for a while, you’ll be asked to fill out a survey providing your thoughts. If you have the time, please consider filling this out, it’d help us a lot <3

If you’d like to discuss the demo with other players, or find people to play with, please consider joining our Discord Server! There are a lot of friendly people there who’d love to play.

The team will be entering a holiday break pretty soon, but before then we're planning to do a livestream on our YouTube channel where some of the team will be playing the game, and perhaps doing some other things. The scheduling isn't fully locked in right now, but it'll probably be on December 19th, starting sometime between 2-4 PM Central Time. We hope to see you then!

For this next dev blog, we’re going to be talking about a major new set of POIs (points of interest) located on the southern tip of New Yoke Island, and what better way to start than with the heart of it all:

Power Plant

Sat next to a mountain running with gigantic trenches is a large power plant, providing electricity to the surrounding area using a mysterious substance dug from a big mine on the other side of the mountain, and transported to the plant via train. Unfortunately, that mysterious substance is coal. Locals speculate that this was chosen because “it looks cool”... Anyway, the power plant is a surprisingly dense area filled with a lot of detail, while still remaining performant. There are train tracks running through it, tons of large pipes, tiny spaces to hide in, and more.

The power plant was designed, modeled, and textured by Emma, who’s done a phenomenal job. I enjoy showing behind the scenes stuff and I’m sure at least some of you enjoy seeing it, so here’s some insight from Emma on the creation process, as well as a couple screenshots from her development software:

The power plant was inspired mainly by an existing German coal plant I was given to use as reference. I started with a blockout of the buildings as simple boxes, making sure it didn't overlap the train tracks and wasn't too big or small, with a good amount of vertical and horizontal shapes to have a nice silhouette from all angles. After the design was set, the main challenge was to keep it low poly but with a good amount of details. I managed to make it less than 30k triangles, which is very low for such a big structure, by having as few rounded shapes as possible and using a lot of boxes for the details. The power plant has many pipes going in and out of the buildings that are supported by railings. To avoid having to use too many polygons on those structures, I made a texture with a custom mask that I applied on simple boxes, which gives a very nice silhouette and shadows and makes the whole area feel more industrial.

Port

If you look ever so slightly south of the power plant, you’ll find a shiny new port to explore! We’ve had a fairly substantial community of ship builders in SP1 for quite some time now, but we never really had any points of interest that were particularly exciting for boat stuff. That’s all changing now though; in the port you’ll find docks, ship hangars, a dry dock, and if you were disappointed at the power plant not being nuclear, you’ll also find a couple of nuclear submarines in the docks.

Aside from having cool places to do your boat stuff in, the port is also a pretty substantial chunk of flat, paved ground to play around on, in-case you want a lot of wide open space to drive in.

Like the power plant, Emma made the port, as well as the submarine model. Here’s some more of her thoughts:

The port is located between the power plant and the military base, so the idea was to use it for both industrial and military purposes. I was free to design it any way I wanted using the list of elements that the team gave me, which was quite a fun task. I first designed the ground, taking the terrain of the area into account and placed blockouts of the elements I wanted in it, I then detailed each element. It has piers for normal sized boats, a dry dock, wide areas where big cranes can be placed, an aircraft carrier dock, hangars and a lot of ramps to easily go in and out of the water. Just like with the power plant, a lot of elements are modules that are instanced in the engine: ladders, cranes, ramps, all to \

Located south-east of the power plant and port is the last thing in our overview of southern New Yoke, protecting all the infrastructure we’ve been talking about in the area: a military base!

Bannock Station

Named after Russell Bannock – a Canadian ace pilot during World War 2 and a prolific test pilot thereafter – Bannock Station sets itself apart from the rest of the airports by a fully-fledged military base, breaking the trend you’ve seen of locations that are designed for civilian use.

Bannock is the work of Henry/DeezDucks, who you may recall from previous posts as the person who made the Driftwood Circuit and several other parts of the environment (as well as various stock crafts in the game). There’s a lot to talk about here, but rather than speak of these details myself I’ll let Henry talk your ear out for a little bit:

Me again, Bannock Station is the Military Airport that I've been working on for the archipelago in the past few months. When setting out with the style of the location, I looked at multiple Western style air bases as the basis of the design, with heavy influence taken from American, German, Norwegian and Canadian Air bases in particular (see if you can spot the different aspects).

Located next to the power plant and port, this proximity and the terrain were the main considerations I needed to design around, so the layout had to be optimized and compacted a bit. I nonetheless tried to include a wide variety of spaces on the apron, like Fighter and Cargo Maintenance hangars, with accompanying aircraft models from Emma (Community Manager’s note: Specifically, the heavy-lift cargo planes you see parked in a couple of these screenshots are Emma’s work), and eventually a rotary and search and rescue facility.

This base also includes some new and exciting things to SimplePlanes that I was pretty keen on pushing for, like dispersed hardened aircraft shelters and an emergency arresting system at both ends of the main runway. I also tried adding a lot of different options for positioning/parking your vehicles to hopefully make screenshots, roleplaying more interesting and give you guys cool places to hang out during multiplayer sessions.

I've been pretty busy with grad school shenanigans recently so there's still a couple more changes on the way before the game’s release, I'm nonetheless excited to show this new POI that I've been cooking up :)

So there you have it, a Canadian member of the community made us a Canadian-inspired military base named after a Canadian pilot :P

We really hope you have fun with it!

If you like these posts, please wishlist the game on Steam! It really helps us a lot.

A new day, a new blog post. This time, it’s about more environmental vehicles! If you missed the last time we talked about these, please check out Environments Part 3. Among other things, it goes over Emmanuelle Le Nouaille’s contributions to the game, which we’ll be going over more of here.

Blimps & Balloons

In the linked post (as well as in the first demo if you played it) you may have noticed that the sky around Driftwood Island is populated by little hot air balloons and even a blimp. These are fairly self explanatory; they float around, look pretty, and generally stay out of your way. What you might not have noticed is that they actually have physics and can be destroyed! If you hit one too hard, they’ll explode somewhat unceremoniously. But if you gently nudge them, they’ll actually give way and move in the direction you push them. If you want to, I’m pretty sure it’s entirely possible to push the blimp all the way to the ground. I’m not sure why you’d want to do this, but maybe it’ll be pivotal to some obscure speedrun technique discovered 11 years from now.

Boats

Docked behind Kunimitsu Airport, you might have also noticed the yachts we showed off previously. Like the balloons, these also have physics! They bob with the water, but you can also push them around, to sometimes fairly silly results based on the antics we’ve already seen some people get into.

Train

On the southernmost end of New Yoke Island you’ll find something special: a train! Yup, you read that right, we have a train roaming around the area, traveling between two points of interest we’ll talk about later.

The train and its various pieces were modeled by Emma, with @RailfanEthan providing a lot of helpful knowledge for the details of its design, as well as the layout of the railway itself.

As you would probably expect, the train travels along a preset path, carrying important cargo to wherever important cargo is needed, and it does not care if you’re in its way. You can ride it though, in-case you manage to get Chad stranded on the railway. Or, if you don’t care for the \ economy (or for trainhopping Chads), you can use explosives or concussive force to derail the train and ruin fictional peoples’ days in your imagination.

If you like what you're seeing, please consider wishlisting SimplePlanes 2 on Steam. If you'd like to see bits of these blogs early, consider joining our Discord Server!

A few months ago you got to see some of the capabilities of the brand new fuselage part in SP2. This next blog post will showcase some other bits we didn’t talk about, like the UI (which wasn’t ready at the time we first talked about these).

Sliders

No, I don’t mean “slider” as in the type of burger (Chad probably doesn’t even know how to cook). Sliders are a UI element that you click and drag to do various things. The new fuselages make extensive use of sliders for adjusting all their fancy new properties, all neatly categorized into tabs to minimize the amount of scrolling you have to do. Alongside the sliders you’re used to for fuselage slicing, we’ve got sliders for:

• Trapezium editing, from -100% and 100%

• Corner radius, either for every corner at once or each individual corner, and in either absolute or relative units depending on whether you’re using the rounded or stretched option for a particular corner

• Edge curvature, from 0-100% on all four edges individually

• Nose cone roundness, from 0% (very pointy) to 100% (very blunt)

With all of these combined, you can easily make some truly fascinating shapes with just a single fuselage, ranging from stealthy looking cross sections (just aesthetically; we don’t have proper radar cross section simulation at the moment, but maybe some day) to abominations that look so bizarre they’re probably throwing an error somewhere.

If you need more precision, you can also manually type in values via a text field, which leads nicely into something else…

Decimals

Okay, that sounds like kind of a boring thing to put in a big ol header text but hear me out. Previously if you manually input values in the fuselage UI it would sometimes get rounded to some other number because of floating point shenanigans. This is annoying and confusing, so now values input into the fuselage UI are stored in decimal values rather than floating point, allowing you to input as many trailing digits after a decimal point as you want without it being rounded to something else in the UI. Note though that internally these values are still stored as floating point, so no extra physical precision is gained from this change, it’s only to improve the user experience so that numbers remain what you set them as.

Mass

A big frustration with the fuselages in SimplePlanes 1 was that they're just so heavy, leading many to use XML editing to significantly mass scale their crafts in order to bring their mass more in line with what they expect.

For SP2 we've taken a few steps to combat this.

First, fuselages are generally much lighter now across the board, using a different mass estimation that is hopefully more in line with expectations.

Second, slicing, corner radius, and the new edge curvature settings all properly contribute to a fuselage's mass now, meaning if you cut one in half it should weigh half as much rather than retaining the exact same mass as the original part.

These changes will hopefully reduce the number of instances where mass scaling feels necessary, leading to an overall more streamlined building experience.

Additionally, you may notice that you can now toggle whether a fuselage is hollow or not, rather than the hollow fuselage being an entirely separate part. You may also notice that doing this has no effect on the mass; this might seem like an oversight or a bug, but it is by design. Although the non-hollow fuselage appears entirely solid, realistically it's actually hollow inside which the mass calculations take into consideration. So the only real difference between the hollow and non-hollow fuselage is the end caps (or lack thereof), which is such a miniscule difference that we opted to just keep them the same mass. Also, making the hollow fuselage weigh less brings some potential performance concerns, as the comparatively lower mass could drive players to almost exclusively use hollow fuselages, which adds a lot of extra geometry.

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So there was going to be another part of this blog post, but unfortunately we had to cut it out. Stay tuned, perhaps in the near future we'll fill the hole we left here...

If you like what you're seeing, please consider wishlisting SimplePlanes 2 on Steam. If you'd like to see bits of these blogs early, consider joining our Discord Server!

Our procedural powertrain system might seem like it’s just for cars, however it is anything but that. We are adding aircraft engines that can interact with powertrains in the same way the car engine can, using a brand new procedural propeller part you attach to the front (or to a driveshaft anywhere else!), and it all interconnects nicely to let you do just about whatever you want. You can power a car with an aircraft engine, or an aircraft with a car engine if you're so inclined. You can power multiple propellers with a single engine if you can connect it up with the proper driveshafts and powertrain parts. It’s all in your hands, and it’s something we’re really excited about.

The rest of the aircraft engine section of this post will be handled by Andrew:

The Engines

We are starting with three distinct procedural engine types to cover the most popular styles.

Flat Aircraft Engine

This is your bread and butter for general aviation. Compact, air-cooled, and lightweight, it’s perfect for small trainers or bush planes. It doesn't have the raw grunt of the bigger engines, but it fits where others won't and keeps your weight down.

Liquid Cooled V-Engine

If you want speed, this is where you start. Inspired by legends like the Merlin engine found in the P-51 Mustang, this engine is larger, heavier, and significantly more powerful.

Radial Engine

Big, heavy, and absolutely full of awesome. This is for when you want to move a lot of air and look good doing it. It might not be the most aerodynamic or efficient option, but it makes up for it in sheer style.

The customization here is impressive. You can stack cylinders to your heart's content. We’re talking up to 3 rows of 9 cylinders each. That is a 27-cylinder monster capable of putting out over 1,000 horsepower without a supercharger.

The New Propeller Assembly

An engine is only as good as the thing it spins. The Propeller Assembly has been completely rebuilt to keep up with the new physics system.

You still have all the customization you loved in SP1: blade count, diameter, blade width, and pitch. But we’ve added some new toys for the engineers among you. You can now adjust the Hub Scale for better visual integration with your spinners, and crucially, you can now adjust the Twist Angle.

Real propeller blades aren't flat; they twist from root to tip to ensure the angle of attack is efficient across the whole blade. Now, you can fine-tune that twist to optimize your prop for climbing, cruising, or speed.

Prop Physics

The new Propeller Assembly utilizes Blade Element Theory (BET) for its physics simulation. Instead of treating the propeller as a single disc, the game now breaks the blades down into multiple segments. It calculates the angle of attack, velocity, lift, and drag for each segment of the blade individually and sums them up.

If you pitch your blades too aggressively, you’ll feel the engine bog down and your RPM drop as the drag torque spikes. If you dive too fast with the throttle cut, you’ll see the prop windmill and actually add torque into the powertrain system.

It is a level of fidelity that simply wasn't possible in the first game, and when combined with the new procedural engines and powertrain, it makes flying feel more alive than ever.

Superchargers

Let's move back over to car engines for a sec. A common way to add extra performance to your engine in real life is to mechanically force extra air into it. This is called a supercharger, and now it’s something you can have in SimplePlanes 2. There are a variety of different options to choose from, all affecting your engine’s performance in different ways. So experiment and see what works best for you! Note though that the content you’ll see here is still in development and is therefore subject to change.

I am admittedly not much of a car person so I’m not very qualified to explain what the different types of supercharger do, so Kevin is here to explain some of what you’ll see in the game in more detail:

Twin-Screw Supercharger: In performance terms, equipping this will deliver an immediate and massive power boost across the entire rev range, but especially from a standstill. It’s the go-to for drag builds and muscle cars that need to launch hard.

But a supercharger is only as good as the air it breathes. That’s where our new intake parts come in, each having a different impact on performance and visuals.

• OEM Air Intake: This is your "stock" setting. It provides balanced, reliable performance with no frills and no penalties. It’s also the lightest option.

• Cold Air Intake: The model features a wide, less restrictive intake pipe and a large, exposed conical filter with left, right and straight orientation. Its main purpose with its positioning is to draw in cooler, denser air from outside the hot engine bay. Equipping a CAI gives you a modest but noticeable horsepower gain. Cooler air is denser air, which means more oxygen for combustion. It’s a great supporting mod for your supercharger, helping it breathe easier and make more power efficiently.

• Ram Air Intake: This one is all about aggression and aerodynamics. The key visual differentiator is the sealed airbox with a dedicated scoop or inlet in three variants, often modeled to integrate with the hood. It's big, it's mean, and it can give a serious boost to horsepower.

Every filter, and every scoop you see in our models is there for a reason, rooted in real-world automotive science. Our goal is to make your customization choices meaningful, both visually and mechanically.

If you like what you're seeing, please consider wishlisting SimplePlanes 2 on Steam. If you'd like to see bits of these blogs early, consider joining our Discord Server!

Hello again! It’s been a few weeks since the last dev blog, as we took a break while you all were playing the demo (which we really hope you had fun with, we plan to do more in the future!) but we’re back with more.

We’re kicking things back off with something you may have already noticed a bit of in the demo: sound design. A lot of work has been done to make SimplePlanes 2 sound nicer than our previous games.

Due to this site not having a built-in video player, at the end of this post there will be a link to a YouTube video showing the subjects discussed in here.

User Interface

To start, Andrew has given the user interface (aka UI) a total auditory makeover, with every interaction now having a satisfying sound to it. You’ll notice little mouse clicks and other diegetic noises as you navigate the UI, which helps a lot in making it feel nice to use. It’s hard to talk about this with words, so I’ll let the video do the rest of the talking.

Part Sounds

Next up is the parts. Every sound emitted by parts in this game has received some much-needed love. In some cases this means simple processing improvements for existing sounds which you might or might not notice, and in other cases we’ve completely replaced sounds with new ones. All sounds now also fade with distance, such as the little clicks made by buttons in your cockpit.

One thing you’re likely to notice is the improvements to the Cannon part. Its firing sound is replaced by something that much more closely resembles what you’d expect a gunshot to sound like, but not only that; its sound also changes according to the properties of the part, so a relatively small autocannon is going to sound less powerful than a full-blown tank cannon. Perfect for letting other players in multiplayer know you mean business based on sound alone.

If you happened to check out the cockpit views of the stock crafts during the demo (if you didn’t, imagine I’m looking disapprovingly at you, because the cockpits are awesome), something else you might have noticed is that the first person view muffles audio now. By default, this is just a static effect that muffles all of the craft sound, but in your craft’s chair settings you can change the intensity of it. For the more advanced players, you can go a step further and use FunkyTrees to dynamically change the muffle intensity based on your craft inputs, allowing for sound to be muffled only when a canopy or door is closed.

Environment Sounds

As part of our effort to improve the overall immersion in the game, we’ve been working on environment sounds. As you might expect, these are sounds that play in the world that aren’t necessarily coming from the player and they help to make everything feel more alive.

To start, some parts of the map will have reverb, making all the sounds you hear loudly reverberate like you might expect in, say, the massive cave in Middleton.

Next, water is noisy now. When you’re next to a body of water you’ll notice a gentle sloshing from the waves, and when you go under there’s more sounds to, er, immerse you. I won’t apologize for the pun.

Video Showcase:

If you like what you're seeing, please consider wishlisting SimplePlanes 2 on Steam. If you'd like to see bits of these blogs early, consider joining our Discord Server!

The SimplePlanes 2 Flight Demo is officially live! To participate, just go to the SimplePlanes 2 Steam page and click the “Request Access” button in the playtest box. The game will automatically be added to your Steam library so you can just download it and start playing! This demo runs until November 3, so you have all week to play.

What To Expect

As we’ve talked about before, this demo does not contain the building mechanics other than the paint tool, it is instead focused on the multiplayer sandbox aspect of the game on a small section of the map. You can try out all of the new stock crafts, repaint and texture them to your liking with the paint tool, race your friends (or blow them up), protect Driftwood Island from bombers and mechs, and probably also break the game in ways we hadn’t thought of.

When you enter a craft for the first time there will be a little quick start guide telling you the basic controls, as well as how to load crafts and start activities. We have a variety of activities in the demo, and we encourage you to try them out! To play with your friends, click the “FLY” button in the main menu and you can host or join a game. If hosting a private game, you’ll have to invite people through the Steam overlay (opened via pressing Shift+Tab). If somebody is being a nuisance in your lobby, the host can kick them via the player list (where you can also copy other players’ crafts if you want).

If you come across a bug, click the little bug icon in the pause menu to report it to us and we’ll take a look. Please make sure to provide clear instructions for reproducing the issue, if possible. Once you’ve played for a little while, you’ll be asked to fill out a feedback survey. Filling this out is optional, but doing so would help us a lot!

Thank you so much for playing. If you enjoy your time in the demo, please wishlist the game as every wishlist helps us a lot. We hope you have fun, I’m sure some of the team will occasionally hop into random multiplayer lobbies to see what you’re up to.

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!

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, keeping load times pretty much non-existent when you’re moving back and forth between designing and flying. This solves every problem with the previous approach, and makes things much more convenient for the player. Here’s what Andrew has to say about it:

Multiplayer really forced us to redesign how the flight scene works. We can't have players exiting the flight scene every time they want to change their craft or make a tweak because they'd lose all their state in flight. This was especially problematic for the server as that would kill the server and boot all the players. This was actually the primary reason. Now, it's hard to imagine not being able to swap your craft, download something from the website, or make a change to your craft without losing your progress. Supporting multiplayer forced us to solve this problem and it ended up making the game so much more enjoyable in singleplayer as well.

Performance

SP2 is quite a pretty game in comparison to its predecessor, and with that comes extra demand on hardware. Compared to SP1, SP2 on PC now requires a dedicated graphics card with at least 3 GB of VRAM. You may be able to get away with going below the minimum requirements depending on your hardware (and your standards), but if you don’t have enough VRAM in particular you might not have much luck.

Regardless, just because a game has higher system requirements than its predecessor doesn’t mean we shouldn’t strive to make it run as smoothly as possible on a wide range of hardware. So in SP2 we have a lot of graphical settings to let you sacrifice visual fidelity in favour of more frames per second. Trees can be reduced or removed, shadows can be disabled, terrain details can be reduced, and so on, helping to ensure the game can run nice and smooth even if you don’t have top of the line hardware.

Outside of just graphics, multiplayer has forced us to make a lot of optimizations to craft performance as well, as even a craft with a relatively modest part count can cause a hefty drop in performance if there’s seven other people using it at the same time. We will continue to make further improvements on this front over time, but right now you should already notice considerable performance improvements with high part count crafts. In one case, I tried out a 10,000 part craft with a performance cost of 25,000 and got 4 frames per second in SP1, but 20-25 in SP2. That’s 5x better performance! Your mileage may vary of course, but in general your monstrous crafts should run much better now (best not to bring them into multiplayer, though).

Additionally, the new parts in SimplePlanes 2 are more capable than the old ones, so you’ll be able to do more with less, meaning extra performance just from not having to use as many parts to make a detailed craft. Believe it or not, all of our new stock crafts use no more than 350 parts! Additionally, thanks to some wizardry by Nicky, the new wings and fuselages use a Unity feature called Burst to make them nice and optimized!

And that does it! We'll see you in a few days for the demo. Don't forget to wishlist SimplePlanes 2 on Steam, and if you'd like to chat with people about the demo when it goes live, join our Discord server!

Welcome to Part 3 of our set of blogs showing off the new wings! This one goes into some more enhancements to visuals and physics, so let's get into it, starting with...

Propeller Blur

Er... propellers are technically wings, right? I know, put away your nerd emojis, I just had nowhere else to put this. So anyway...

When something like a propeller blade spins very fast, it creates a blur effect that is rather plainly called motion blur. Propellers had motion blur in SimplePlanes 1 but it was very basic, merely being a flat rotating texture. Because of that, they had various visual shortcomings, mainly that they were infinitely thin from the side and they didn’t really interact with the lighting in a convincing way.

So for SimplePlanes 2 we “borrowed” a technique Philip had previously developed for version 1.1 of Juno: New Origins for proper 3D motion blur on propellers, giving them actual depth, better lighting, and overall much better visual fidelity. Not only that, but the blur properly adapts to the current properties of your propeller like the shape, RPM, or pitch!

GIF is a very limiting file format to work with; if you'd like to download a higher quality MP4 version of this, click on this text

This effect looks much better than the old motion blur – so much better in fact that we’ve also applied it to helicopter rotors! Additionally, it holds up much better than before in slow motion or when paused, showing the blades partially blurred but not with the full intensity seen at regular speed.

GIF is a very limiting file format to work with; if you'd like to download a higher quality MP4 version of these, click on this text

Propellers and rotors now also have new XML properties that let you customize parts of the motion blur’s behaviour, letting aesthetically-minded technical players get their hands dirty to make things look how they want if the default values aren’t cutting it.

Spanwise Flow

In the Wings Part 2 dev blog, we went over some of the physics for the new wings in SP2. This section will elaborate a bit on one aspect of those: “spanwise flow”

In real life, wings produce different amounts of lift across different parts of the wingspan, with lift gradually being reduced towards the tip of the wing. This wasn’t modeled in SP1, meaning the whole wing produced the same amount of lift, which left a lot to be desired.

SP2 on the other hand has a whole spanwise flow model developed by Nicky through blood sweat and tears, simulating it and many of the resulting characteristics it gives to your wings but in a simplified enough manner that you don’t need a supercomputer to run it.

One of the biggest differences you’ll notice here is with stalling behaviour. For the uninitiated, stalling is essentially when the angle of attack of your wing (the angle of the front edge relative to the airflow) is so high that it can no longer effectively produce lift, making the aircraft drastically less controllable. In SP1 the whole wing would abruptly stall at once, but now in SP2 wings will gradually stall from the tip to the root, resulting in generally much more gentle and realistic stalls.

“Induced drag” is also modeled now, essentially being extra drag that comes as a direct result of the lift your wings are producing. More efficient wing shapes such as those with a large wingspan will have less induced drag than less efficient shapes, creating more of a need to balance your designs than SP1 had.

As a result of these new effects, delta wings (previously a notable victim of SP1’s wing physics) are back with a vengeance, now capable of reaching the high angles of attack they were always destined to; perhaps with a bit more proficiency than they realistically should unless we make the physics even more advanced later down the line, but for now their excessive performance makes for extra fun for the player.

As this is inherently an abstract force that is hard to observe, we’ve added a nifty visualizer to see the lift and drag forces coming from your wings. This was originally a developer-only visualizer used for debugging, but our playtesters saw usefulness in it so now you too can see a flurry of benevolent green lines coming out of your wings if you so choose.

GIF is a very limiting file format to work with; if you'd like to download a higher quality MP4 version of this, click on this text

GIF is a very limiting file format to work with; if you'd like to download a higher quality MP4 version of this, click on this text

Wingtip Vortices

You know those little trails you often see coming from the wings of all sorts of planes? Those have a name, they’re called wingtip vortices. They’ve been a fairly commonly requested visual effect for both SP1 and Juno for a long time, and at long last they’re made their way into SP2.

We could have simply hardcoded some basic logic that just makes a trail come from the tip of your wing and called it a day, but we didn’t do that. Using the spanwise flow model Nicky developed, we can have wingtip vortices that actually take the physical characteristics of your wing into account like the lift it’s generating, the distribution of that lift, the shape of the wing, and more.

For a slightly more complicated explanation, wingtip vortices are, as the name might suggest, a result of a fast-rotating vortex formed behind a wing. The precise reasoning for the formation of said vortex is… complicated aerodynamics stuff that’s beyond the scope of this post, but basically there’s a lot of weird airflow happening on the wing, with sideways airflow and pressure differences causing the air near the wingtip to rotate, which becomes the vortex. Normally these vortices are invisible as they’re just air, but certain conditions such as your altitude can contribute to making water droplets in the atmosphere condense or even freeze inside the vortex due to the low pressure, which creates a visible trail in a rather similar manner to the distinct funnel cloud seen on a tornado but on a much smaller scale.

For a much more complicated explanation, Nicky recommends NASA TM X-2516, a paper published by NASA in 1972 that proved vital in his research on how to get this stuff into the game. He also wanted me to tell you he’s jealous of their huge wind tunnel. GIF is a very limiting file format to work with; if you'd like to download a higher quality MP4 version of this, click on this text

If you like what you're seeing, please consider wishlisting SimplePlanes 2 on Steam. If you'd like to see bits of these blogs early, consider joining our Discord Server!

As much as I love the music from SimplePlanes 1, it quickly got pretty repetitive in-game as there were only five songs and they played all the time, ultimately leading to many people just muting the music and listening to something else while they play.

So for SimplePlanes 2, we have a brand new in-game soundtrack comprising of fifteen songs, composed by a lovely duo called Fat Bard (who we worked with previously to make the music of Juno: New Origins). They’ve made music for tons of games over the years, and we’re really happy with what they made for SP2.

To give you a taste of what you can expect, here’s a full song, titled “Speed for Speed”:

And while you listen, here’s an interview with Fat Bard!

• How long have you been composing, and what other game soundtracks have you worked on?

  We've been composing for about 14 years now in games, but we also wrote music well before that as songwriters for various bands we were in during childhood. We've worked on a huge variety of game soundtracks and it's hard to list them off. For more well known live service games, we've done various music packs for Smite, the hit 3rd person MOBA. Then in the AA space we've recently done work on Deadzone Rogue, a lovely looking sci-fi FPS. The indie space is where we do most of our soundtracks; such as Jet Lancer, Demon Turf/Demon Tides, Crashlands 1/2, Rugrats: Adventures in Gameland, of course SimpleRockets 2, and the upcoming Bubsy 4d.

• What inspired the music for SimplePlanes 2?

  Our inspiration for this soundtrack was in huge part 80's rock and electronic music. We wanted to create something that spanned the era, from ballads to electronic to hard hitting rockers. Having separate music for design and flight mode helped in molding this as well.

• What tools, instruments, or techniques did you use to create the soundtrack?

  We used our guitars of course, but primarily a lot of the sounds heard are from our computers. We have plenty of great drum and keyboard libraries to work from. A lot of our keyboard sounds come from the Korg M1.

• Were there any unique challenges when composing for SimplePlanes 2 compared to past projects?

  I think one main challenge was really honing in on that 80's sound, particularly in the guitar and drums. We're always striving for a high quality production sound, and when you're harkening to an older era you have to forgo that in order to get something that sounds authentic.

• Which track is your favorite, and why?

  Hard to pick! "Endless Journey" is probably a favorite, because it's a breezy rocker that feels great no matter what you're doing in game.

• Aside from SimplePlanes 2 😆, which soundtrack has been your favorite to work on?

  HMMMM now that is an even harder question! I think in the last few months our favorite has been Bubsy 4d. We rarely get to explore serious jazz/funk music, so it was a real treat to re-brand Bubsy with some slick music. His history is full of pretty lackluster music, so we really wanted to make some bangers on the new game.

• Where can people find more of your work?

  Folks can find our work on Spotify/Apple Music/iTunes/Bandcamp under "Fat Bard", and if you want to follow us we're "@fatbard.com" on BlueSky and "@fat_bard" on X.

Rather than playing every song no matter what you’re doing like in SimplePlanes 1, parts of SimplePlanes 2’s music are dynamic and change depending on whether you’re chilling in the designer or blowing people up in flight.

Some of the songs are layered, so they’ll seamlessly transition from calmer to more intense when moving from the designer to flight, or vice-versa, which when combined with there being many more songs than before helps keep the music feel less static.

Describing this with words hardly does it any justice, so we’ve made a music video to show off how one of our songs adapts to your gameplay, titled Guided by Starlight:

The SP2 soundtrack will be available to purchase on Steam once the game comes out, so you’ll be able to listen to it all on your own time while supporting Fat Bard and the developers!

If you like what you're seeing (or listening to, in this case), please consider wishlisting SimplePlanes 2 on Steam. If you'd like to see bits of these blogs early, consider joining our Discord Server!

As some of you may know, Steam Next Fest started yesterday, which is a week-long event Steam runs a few times a year where tons of game developers publish demos of their upcoming games. As you probably also know, the SimplePlanes 2 Demo isn’t a part of it. We would have loved to participate in this Next Fest, but the Flight Demo just wasn’t ready in time. However, though the demo isn’t ready right now, we promised it would be in October and we intend to keep that promise, so without further adieu, you’ll be able to play the demo on…

October 27

That’s just under two weeks from now! This demo will be available for a week, and as a reminder it will offer a limited part of the SimplePlanes 2 experience, with:

• A “read-only” designer, where you can look around and load our new stock crafts or your old SimplePlanes 1 crafts and paint them, but can’t add or modify parts.

• Driftwood Island, a small island east of the main isles densely packed with points of interest, including a race track. Attempting to venture too close to the main islands will result in your demise via missiles.

• Numerous activities to play by yourself or with friends, including races, PvP deathmatches, and more.

To gain access to the demo as soon as it’s available, head on over to our Steam page, find the “Join the SimplePlanes 2 Playtest” section just under the game overview, and click “Request Access”. When the demo comes out, it will immediately be added to your Steam library so you can just download and play! We’re also steadily ramping up playtesting for the demo version, so if you click that button you may get randomly selected to help test stuff a little bit early :)

One last thing. Although we weren’t able to participate in it ourselves, if you’re looking for new stuff to play or just want something to hold you over for a little bit before the 27th, we do highly encourage checking out what Next Fest has to offer, and wishlisting anything you end up enjoying. There’s a lot of cool stuff in there made by lots of great game developers, it’s all free, and you might just find something you really like. There’s a couple demos I’d like to personally shout out:

Hijong Park’s Defender Patrol

A low poly flight simulator where you fly an MD-500MG, a cute little armed scout helicopter that would eventually be developed into the iconic Little Bird. It has a very interactive cockpit, and although it’s playable in flatscreen I highly recommend trying it in VR if you’re able to as it’s really fun there.

In The Black

For any hard sci-fi nerds who may be reading this, In The Black is kind of a dream come true. It’s a realistic first-person spaceship combat simulator where you have to fly around using actual orbital mechanics. It’s not like flying a plane where you can just change directions on a dime; if you want to change the direction you’re moving or come to a stop, you’d better be prepared to manually cancel your velocity by burning in the opposite direction.

Nobody at Jundroo is affiliated with these games or any of their developers, I just think they’re cool and worth a shoutout.

That’s all for now, thanks for your patience and we’ll see you soon.

Like its predecessor, in SimplePlanes 2 you’ll be able to play a number of activities, ranging from races to combat challenges to some less conventional activities we’ll get into soon. Unlike SP1 though, in SP2 you’ll be able to play all of these activities in multiplayer!

Races

In SP2, there are a bunch of races for you to choose from in a variety of locations, from traditional circuit races on the Driftwood Circuit, to long sprints through a winding touge, to dangerous air races that let you thread the needle to truly off your aircraft piloting skills.

To start an activity, click the activities button in the flight scene and select something. If selecting a race, set a number of laps (if applicable), and anyone in a multiplayer game will have a chance to decide whether or not to participate, as well as change their craft to something appropriate for the task. Once in a race, it’s the familiar setup of ring checkpoints you’re used to from SP1, with some visual and quality of life improvements, such as being able to restart from the last checkpoint if you messed up (or if someone rudely bumped you off course). (this particular gif is a blooper from a developer playtest)

Combat

To test out the lethality of your crafts, there are some combat activities to try out, best done with friends! As some of these are team-based, the in-game targeting system has been updated to allow easy differentiation between friend and foe, with allies appearing blue, enemies appearing red, and neutral crafts being green.

In Deathmatch, the goal is simple: blow up more players than everybody else. It may be advisable to bring a craft with multirole capabilities, as some players may opt to bring a ground-based anti-air vehicle rather than an aircraft, which would be rather unfortunate for anybody unprepared.

In Bomber Intercept, enemy bombers are coming to blow up the airport! Your job is to intercept and destroy them, denying them... whatever goal it is they're trying to achieve. But be careful, they've brought fighter escorts that you'll have to deal with before you have a chance to eliminate the main threat. More players in multiplayer means more bombers and escorts, so you'll have to work together to defeat them.

Wacky Stuff

Alongside the relatively conventional activities like races and Deathmatch, we have some curveballs that offer more unique gameplay.

In Mech Invasion, massive bipedal mechs are emerging from the sea to storm Driftwood Island. Equipped with energy shields, guns, and lots of health, you’re gonna need to bring all the firepower you have in order to take them down. Please note that the footage you’ll see of this activity here is of a work in progress build of the game with placeholder models for the mechs – this was actually the team’s first ever time trying Mech Invasion.

Orb Snatcher is another multiplayer-based activity like Deathmatch, but with a more interesting twist. Around the map are numerous red orbs; fly (or drive) into one and it’ll start following your craft. You can pick up as many as you want at once, with the goal being to deposit them at a set location. Sounds simple enough, however – each orb you carry adds mass and drag to your craft, and other players can steal them from you, encouraging you to ponder how many orbs are worth picking up before becoming a target for other players.

We plan to add more silly activities like these as time goes on. When it comes to SimplePlanes, nothing is ever really out of the question here...

If you like what you're seeing, please consider wishlisting the game. If you'd like to see bits of these blogs early, consider joining our Discord Serverr!

Sitting in SimplePlanes 1’s vast ocean is one of the game’s most iconic locations, which isn’t an island at all, nor necessarily a building; it’s a ship.

The USS Beast has been a much-loved part of the original SimplePlanes, but with its last revision being all the way back in 2019 with Version 1.8, it’s been long overdue for an upgrade.

The USS Beast II

I’m not gonna mince words: Kevin has done a phenomenal job giving the Beast a complete remake. The entire thing was completely rebuilt from scratch, nothing was untouched. The entire model is so much higher in fidelity, feeling more like a real location than the Beast ever has, with some neat new features to boot.

Letting Kevin take over for a minute, here’s some insight into the creative process behind the Beast II:

The USS Beast II aircraft carrier was inspired by the real-world CVN-78 Gerald R. Ford class. I kept the iconic silhouette of the angled flight deck and island superstructure so it’s instantly recognizable as a modern naval powerhouse. But from there, I deliberately left the design open so we could work around some frustrating gameplay elements with the elevators in the landing zone along with vertex budget management. The goal wasn't to create a perfect 1:1 replica, but something that is authentic and grounded/game-ready.

Alongside an entire new model, the Beast II sports some neat extra additions:

• Destructible planes are parked all over the deck

• There are fancy new buttons in the UI for using the catapults and elevators

• The carrier’s movement leaves a wake in the ocean behind it with actual physics, creating hazardous water conditions for any vessels following too closely

If you happen to be wondering where the carrier’s typical destroyer escort is, don’t worry – the old escort duo has been retired so you can’t see them anywhere in this showcase, but they are pending new, more modern replacements that will be ready to keep your trigger finger in check same as ever :)

In the wake of the new Beast II, you might have noticed that the water in SimplePlanes 2 is looking quite a bit different from the very flat water in SimplePlanes 1. That’s because it is!

Using an asset called Crest by Wave Harmonic – the same asset that allows us to have bodies of water above sea level for things like rivers – we’re finally able to support significantly improved water graphics and physics.

The biggest thing Crest gives us aside from rivers is support for actual waves that jostle your craft around. The flat seas of SP1 are no more, now you have to design your boats with turbulent water in mind lest you get caught in the waves and capsize. Here you’ll see a gif with a debug tool showing some behind the scenes stuff for the physics, with little pink nodes showing exactly what parts of the water are being sampled to gently (or violently) bounce your craft around.

Wave size varies depending on the weather, water depth, and location, meaning things will be much more intense if you set the weather to stormy far out in the sea than if you’re in fair weather on the coast.

(Gif at 2x speed to make gif compression easier)

Thanks to a mod by Gestour (with help from Nicky), you’ve actually been able to play SP1 with waves for nearly five years. As such, crafts that were made with this mod in mind may behave better in SP2 than ones that weren’t. If on the other hand you designed your ships for the flat mirror-like oceans of SP1, you may unfortunately be in for a slight rude awakening. We’ve tested a ton of crafts from the website and many of them don’t take to the seas of SP2 very well, so you may have to do some extra tuning to survive out there.

Aside from just waves that throw you around, the new water has a whole bunch of visual improvements. Improved underwater graphics, caustics on both the sea floor and your craft, sea foam, different colours based on the environment, coastal waves… It’s all a huge gamechanger not just for ship builders, but for pretty much anybody.

If you like what you're seeing, please consider wishlisting the game! If you'd like to see bits of these blogs early, consider joining our Discord Server!

Hello again! It's blog post time again, this time with yet another set of map-related stuff to show off! We've got vehicles, a new island, and more! So let's get started:

In SimplePlanes 2 there are a number of vehicles that spawn around the map, ranging from cars to airplanes, boats, and even the occasional blimp or hot air balloon. They all spawn in predefined areas that we’re able to set, and each has a randomized colour palette.

In order to maintain a balance of quality and performance (among other reasons), these vehicles are their own handmade 3D models rather than crafts made in the game. Achieving something with the scope we wanted is a large undertaking, so we called in reinforcements.

Enter Emmanuelle Le Nouaille, or simply Emma. Emma is a 3D artist who’s been making many of these vehicles for us, having previously made a number of structures for a little-known game called Microsoft Flight Simulator. Everything she’s made for SP2 is built to look pretty without feeling stylistically out of place with the rest of the game, serving as nice little setpieces to make the world of SP2 feel less lonely.

Emma has some words of her own to share in regards to the creative process here, so I’m going to let her take over now:

I was asked to make several vehicles to populate the airport, including a blimp, hot air balloon, a yacht, golf cart, planes and a helicopter. This was a fun task as I got to use some of the skills and techniques I had learned working on Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020, where I was taught very handy hard surface modelling techniques that give a really nice result. I am very proud of the vehicles I have made for SimplePlanes 2 and hope they enhance the overall game.

The vehicle modelling process is always the same for me, first I need to create a bounding box that is the length, width and height of the vehicle I am making, then I set up some blueprints of that vehicle which I download off the internet. Next I will start with primary shapes, a box, or cylinder or plane, which I conform and add lines to and slowly build up the final shape from the least amount of lines possible. Once the silhouette is correct I can start adding details like windows and doors and some panels, which I cut into the surface. And, finally, I add the small parts, like door handles, aerials, and lights. The main difficulty was trying to keep the polycount as low as possible while also making sure all the curved surfaces were curved enough. Once the vehicle is modeled, I lay out the UVs to be able to texture it. I made the textures fairly simple to match the style of the vehicles players make in the game. Also, the materials are made to be able to change the color of the vehicles ingame for more variety. The last step is to create LODs (level of details): From the vehicle I modeled and textured, I make a version with a reduced amount of polygon that will be displayed in the game from a distance. It’s a classic optimization method that is very efficient to make the game run faster.

Located just off the east coast of Vetusta Island is a whole other island we haven’t talked about yet, called Driftwood Island.

Driftwood is a bit different from the other three islands. It’s a small, eccentric private island that’s densely packed with fun playspaces, with its main attraction being:

Kunimitsu Airport

Named after Kunimitsu Takahashi – a legendary Japanese racing driver who popularized the art of drifting in a car – Kunimitsu Airport is a private airport set on the southern end of Driftwood Island, built to be a hotspot for all sorts of high-profile racing events both on and off the ground.

Kunimitsu is another collaboration with Emma that we’re very proud of, so once again I’ll let her speak for herself:

Due to my previous experience as an environment and props artist, working on Flight Simulator 2020, creating airports, monuments and vehicles I was hired by Jundroo to work on SimplePlanes 2. The first model I worked on was \ airport. Working closely with the team, I designed original buildings that look like a small private airport with all its functionalities: runways, taxi ways, control tower (ATC), firestation, terminal, hangar, radar antenna and fuel station. It was a fun task to do as I got to express creativity with the designs while keeping them functional and fun to play. We wanted a classy feel, inspired by luxury hotels in Dubai and also private airports, while keeping with the mood of the game.

From the blockout and the brief provided by the team I modelled a terminal building with organic shapes and a glass ceiling, inspired by modern architecture. The team wanted the airport to be able to receive a lot of different vehicles from air, ground and water so we designed it with helipads on the roof, a big hangar at the front where small planes can come from the runways, floating piers at the back to park boats and an underground parking for cars. I hope it's fun to play around on.

The ATC is a fairly classic design but since the Terminal building is quite tall, the ATC needed to be tall as well. This became a problem as it felt out of place next to the terminal. To solve that problem, plus balance the design more, we ended up lowering the roof of the Terminal and adding a race control tower on the lower section of the ATC. Yes, I forgot to mention before, we have a racetrack at the airport.

I designed the main hangars next to the terminal building with arched roofs. The team liked the idea and pushed it further, "Why not be able to drive on the hangar?" Following their idea, I modified the shape to have the roof starts from the ground, that way players can drive on the hangar with cars. I adjusted the models several times so they work nicely together in harmony.

You read Emma correctly; woven into Kunimitsu Airport is a full-fledged race track, lovingly crafted by another contributor we’ve brought on to help us create SP2’s environments.

The Driftwood Circuit and most of its surroundings besides the airport is made by Henry Deng, who many of you may know better as DeezDucks, a prominent member of the SimplePlanes community and a moderator on our website. Collaborating with him has been a treat, and it’s resulted in one of my favourite areas in the game.

As with Emma’s contributions, Henry is much more suited to talk about this than me, so I’ll leave the rest of the explanation to him:

Most of you may already know me, some of you may not. I’ve recently had the opportunity to help out with environmental assets and related art for SP2. Of the items I’ve worked on so far, the most recent and by far the largest is Driftwood Circuit. Connected to and carving through Kunimitsu’s airport layout, Driftwood Circuit represents a huge leap in fidelity for race tracks over SP1. While the layout of the circuit was already made (the full layout of which I’ll leave a secret, but will look familiar to those who notice), I worked on the trackside buildings, barriers, and details. Something that I wanted to improve on from SP1’s tracks was the immersion and sense of scale. Alongside the improved fitment of the track with the terrain, the inclusion of new runoffs and barriers will make racing between friends much more forgiving (sometimes, sometimes not) and fun.

The circuit is separated into four distinct sectors, each with a unique feel. I looked at a wide variety of real life tracks and modeled certain aspects after them as an homage to legendary racetracks and to try and show respect to our motorsports enthusiasts. The last sector includes a number of alternate routes, allowing for multiple combinations and lengths of layouts. These combined with the new activities, will give everybody a ton of things to do in lots of different cars, from formula racers, to drift cars or stadium trucks. In the future, Driftwood Circuit won’t be the only track to populate the island, and hopefully they’ll live up to the hype. I’ll be back a few more times this week to talk about some of the other things I’ve been working on.

Among the contributions Henry has made to the world of SP2 besides Driftwood Circuit are various bridges around the map, ranging from a grand suspension bridge connecting two islands together to a small bridge on a touge. There are quite a few bridges scattered across the islands; if you happen to be a bridge enthusiast, I’m sure you’ll have fun. Or maybe you just want to blow them up, nobody’s gonna stop you.

As with last time, I will be acting as a bridge for Henry to talk about some of this stuff himself. Here’s what he has to say:

Acting as the gateway into New Yoke from Middleton, the suspension bridge helps form the main land corridor between the island chain’s two major cities. Following the stylistic direction we wanted, I looked to combine some more classic North American examples with some from East Asia, particularly from Guizhou province in China to create a more unique design.

A number of factors relating to player interactions were considered. The bridge incorporates an array of decorative lights and functional anti-collision beacons, helping it stand out at night. Due to the nature of the terrain on both sides of the water, I had to give the deck of the bridge a rather aggressive arch so that there was enough clearance for most types of military and commercial vessels. If your ship just won't fit, fear not! The entire main structure is able to be fractured, so you can just blast your way through. The rest of the islands have multiple smaller bridges dotted across the landscape, but this one is the standout feature in comparison.

Scattered across the SimplePlanes Archipelago are various little points of interest that add some much-needed atmosphere. These, too, are made by Henry! Here’s what he has to say:

A variety of different POIs dot the landscape of SP2, these are meant to provide players with options that encourage them to explore the more remote corners of the map. Three different types of POIs currently exist: Lighthouses, Firewatch Lookouts, and stunt ramps. Each type has two variations, and more unique POIs are planned for the future.

A number of lighthouses guard the islets and dangerous coasts across the islands. They function with working beacon lights that cast out into the darkness, the tower has both a tall buttressed version, and a shorter stout one. This variety combined with auxiliary support buildings, helps give each location a unique feel.

The firewatch towers come in a tall stilted version and a short stone based one. Often placed far into the forest, these towers provide great opportunities to kick your feet up and enjoy the landscape.

Lastly, players can find a number of stunt jumps dotting the landscape, the call of the void manifested. Coming in a rickety wood and more sturdy steel version, these will help players get maximum air before gravity inevitably takes over.

More unique POIs are planned as the game progresses, but we’ll keep them a secret for now :)

If you like what you're seeing, please consider wishlisting the game! If you'd like to see bits of these blogs early, consider joining our Discord Server!

Hey everyone,

It’s getting late in 2025, and we’ve been hearing a familiar question more and more: "When is the game actually coming out?" So, let’s talk about it. I’ve got good news and bad news.

The good news: We finally have a release month The bad news: It's not until next year

We are going to release SimplePlanes 2 on Steam as Early Access in March of 2026. We're still considering what the initial price will be, most likely it will be $20 or $25 with a 10% launch discount and that price will go up when we exit Early Access. At this point we don't expect to delay the mobile release, but it's certainly possible it will slip to 2027.

Why Early Access? Because we wouldn't dream of trying to finish this game without the community's input. We’ve built something here that we’re truly proud of and it's shaping up to be our most exciting, feature-packed launch ever. But there's still work to do: localization, VR support, more parts, more environments, and most importantly, time to listen and respond to the community before calling it final.

Early Access is the only sensible way to release a game like this, for a community like this.

But, wait! There's more good news!

Now, for the really exciting part. This October, we're releasing a free, limited-time demo on Steam for everyone. This demo, which we're internally calling the Flight Demo, is focused on letting you experience multiplayer and a taste of the new environments. Here's what to expect:

• The designer will be "read-only": You can load up and look at any craft, including your SP1 crafts, but you can't modify them. You won't be able to add, remove, or modify any parts. However, the designer will let you paint your craft so you can check out the new texture system which is pretty sweet.

• New stock crafts: We have a new set of stock crafts built with love by our playtesters. They are awesome. We'll have a showcase post for them in the future.

• Driftwood Island: You will be restricted to a small island just east of the main SP2 Isles. It has plenty of great stuff to check out, so don't try to leave because Nathan has installed a very accurate missile system that will shoot you down.

Aside from those limitations, the demo will let you do quite a lot. You'll be able to start activities such as air & car races, a bomber defense mission, play multiplayer with your friends, or just explore the island! We're really excited to get the game in your hands soon, and we hope this demo will help alleviate some of the sting of having the game delayed. You might even come across a developer in a multiplayer lobby on occasion :)

One last thing. When you check out the Steam page, you might notice some new art. We got new key art for the game from the very skilled Daniel Liske! It turned out really nice, and you'll be seeing it all over the game on Steam now; in the thumbnail, your library, and so on.

If you haven't already, please consider wishlisting SimplePlanes 2 on Steam and joining our Discord Server! We hope to see you in October when we release the demo!

Thanks for your patience and thanks for playing!

-Andrew

Among the original SimplePlanes parts in desperate need of a facelift is the Resizable Wheel. It was introduced over nine years ago and has received relatively little change since then, besides the addition of a number of new visual styles.

Needless to say, improving the wheels has been a high priority for SimplePlanes 2, and we’re really excited to finally show off what we’ve been working on.

To start with, the model for the wheels is much more detailed. Look closely and you’ll see high definition rims, the brake rotor, and the brake caliper – all of which have their own paint trims. There’s also new skidmark and tire smoke visual effects, letting your craft leave a lasting impression everywhere it goes.

As far as customization goes, there’s the standard size and width options you already know and love, but we also went just a tiny bit overboard and now you have over 20 tire styles, over 20 rim styles, and a bunch of tread styles, all of which can be independently selected. You can also use a slider to adjust the offset of the rim, setting it deeper or shallower into the tire. All of these allow for an insane degree of personalization, letting you make your wheels look exactly the way you want them to.

But new visuals aren’t the only thing we did with the wheels. Come on, did you really think we’d leave the physics untouched? Because boy oh boy did we touch them.

The wheel physics have been totally redone, behaving in a much more realistic and fun way. They behave differently depending on the type of surface you’re on (roads, grass, sand, etc), you can drift in them, they have much better colliders, and so much more.

The new wheels use an elliptical grip model (shout out to @hpgbproductions for making a SimplePlanes 1 mod that does a similar thing two years ago!), which is a difficult concept to explain so if you’re interested you can check out this Wikipedia page. What it essentially means is the way the grip in your wheels works is significantly more dynamic and realistic than before, allowing each wheel to oversteer or understeer depending on a multitude of factors for much more interesting vehicle handling.

We’ve tweaked the default properties of the elliptical model to what we feel meets a nice middle ground for the needs of most players, but we’ve left those properties open in the craft XML for those of you who want to fine tune your craft’s handling in a more in-depth way.

Wheels are cool and all, but they don’t exist in a vacuum (unless your name is Apollo). In order to make a vehicle that drives smoothly and doesn’t violently break itself apart at the slightest bump, you need suspension.

You could make suspension in SimplePlanes 1 and many people have happily done so, but it required a fair bit of knowledge of the actual mechanics of real-life suspension and was generally not intuitive to a new player.

So in SimplePlanes 2, we’ve added a brand new procedural Double Wishbone Suspension part with a variety of tweakable properties. Now you can simply drag and drop some suspension onto your craft, tune it to your liking, slap a wheel on it, and go on your merry way!

Here’s a quick rundown of the suspension properties you can customize:

• Size & Extension

  • These are self explanatory. They affect the overall size of the part, as well as how far from the center of the craft it will extend.

• Length

  • This defines the suspension’s range of motion and how far off the ground the main body of your craft will be. A nimble racecar made for a track might prefer a shorter suspension that doesn’t travel much, but an offroader will want all the room it can get to navigate perilous terrain.

• Stiffness

  • This affects the strength of the spring according to how smooth of an experience you want. A softer spring will make for a more pleasant and stable ride on uneven ground, but may not give the desired responsiveness for a track-oriented car that a more firm spring would.

• Damper

  • Effects the suspension’s resistance to vibration. Low damper will make the suspension bouncier when absorbing bumps, and higher damper will keep the suspension steadier which will help plant your tires more firmly onto the road.

• Shock Position

  • A purely cosmetic property that affects how far forward or back the shock absorber is.

Tuning your vehicle’s suspension can be quite a fun process, with an endless variety of configurations depending on what you want – there is no singular “best” option, it’s all about what you want out of any given vehicle. So experiment!

While the double wishbone is the only suspension configuration currently in the game as of writing this, we also have plans to add straight axle suspension! Kevin has already made the model for it, it just needs to be brought to life on the programming side by Andrew.

Circling back to wheels for a moment, we’ve also added steering wheels to the game! You’ve got your traditional circular steering wheel, as well as the more rectangular type commonly seen in high-performance race cars. Just like the joysticks and yokes, they can be gripped by Chad for an added layer of interactivity to your craft.

To make operating the steering wheels more comfortable for Chad, there’s now a reclinable racing chair as well, perfect as a more grounded replacement for the aircraft-centric chairs currently available in the game. You can set it to recline anywhere from 0-90 degrees in the designer, and Chad will lean back along with it – maybe with some neck pain if you don’t adjust his head rotation.

For all the improvements you’ve seen us make to ground vehicles, there’s still one glaring issue left: engines.

In SP1, the Car Engine is incredibly barebones and hardly behaves the way it should, as it merely applies torque to a selected set of wheels and does little else. So let’s fix that.

Procedural Engine & Powertrain System

In SimplePlanes 2 we’re adding procedural engines and transmissions, along with several modular powertrain parts to make it all work. Let’s start with the engine.

The new procedural engine is highly customizable and has significantly more realistic behaviour, while staying simple to set up. Rotational inertia, torque curves, and angular velocity are all simulated now. This lets you really feel the way your engine responds to the variety of situations you put it in, especially with the new RPM gauge in the flight UI that appears when you’re in a car.

There are a few properties you can mess around with on the engine:

• Size

  • Raising this increases the engine’s horsepower and torque, but reduces its maximum RPM and increases its mass.

• Cylinders

  • Increasing the number of cylinders in the engine raises its horsepower and torque without reducing RPM, but makes the engine longer and heavier.

• Engine Tuning

  • With the Engine Tuning slider, you can tune the engine to produce more torque but less RPM, or vice-versa. More torque will improve your vehicle’s acceleration and make it better at carrying heavy loads, but the resulting loss in RPM will reduce your top speed which may not be desirable for a racecar.

Next, the transmission. A transmission allows you to optimize your engine’s output according to how fast you’re going, using a set of gears. The new Transmission part gives you a number of things to tinker with: you can choose between manual or automatic shifting, three different gear profiles preconfigured to be optimized for street, racing, and offroad performance, set the number of gears from 3-10, and you can tune it. Similar to the engine tuning, gear tuning allows you to choose whether to prioritize torque or top speed, allowing for further fine tuning beyond just the engine itself.

Now for some really cool stuff. In order to make the engine work, you use a combination of driveshafts, differentials, and transfer cases to link everything together.

Driveshafts build a path from your engine to other powertrain parts, and differentials and transfer cases allow you to split that output in multiple directions to make any drive configuration you can imagine.

This might sound complicated, but true to the game’s name (well, half of it anyway) we’ve made it quite simple. Just place a driveshaft at the end of your transmission, and the driveshaft will automatically shift and scale itself around to link to any parts you attach to it, allowing for creation of ground vehicles in a way that is both intuitive and educational.

While the whole powertrain system might sound like it’s just for ground vehicles, during development we realized how flexible it truly is – so not only will we be adding additional types of car engine, we’ll also accommodate use of the powertrain system for aircraft via propeller engines and turbines!

We've uploaded a video showing off the new power train system, check it out here:

If you like what you're seeing, please consider wishlisting the game! If you'd like to see bits of these blogs early, consider joining our Discord Server!

This post serves as a follow-up to our previous post about the new wings and fuselages in SimplePlanes 2, with more in-depth information than we gave you in the last one. If you missed Part 1, check it out here.

Wings

This one is going to be a slight change of pace compared to our previous showcases, with some more nerdy talk than usual. If that isn’t your style and you’d rather skip it, then the key takeaway here is this: for SP2, we’ve completely redone the flight model for the wings, making their physics more dynamic and interesting than ever before.

For the nerds that want the juicy details, I’ve let Nicky (the mastermind behind these new wings) write the rest of the showcase as he can explain it far better than I can:

Having heard so many stories from people who played the game as a way to explore aeronautics from a young age and later found themselves growing up into qualified pilots, engineers or mechanics, I knew that the educational side of the game was very important, and I always wanted to expand on it in the sequel.

One way to do this is to increase the fidelity of our flight model. This is something I've been planning for a while and it's great to finally see results. Many modern methods exist for simulating the aerodynamics of aeroplanes, but almost all of them are made for designing real life aircraft. This means that they favour being numerically accurate to real life, at the expense of huge amounts of computational power, and ease of use. SP2's flight model is not for designing real life aircraft and has a very different set of requirements. It needs to be highly performant to run on as many devices as possible and it also needs to be numerically stable. If an iterative solution fails to converge for an aircraft you make, we can't have an engineer hop in and change the simulation parameters to get an accurate solution - it has to just work every time. But, we still want to improve the applicability of the behaviour you see in SP2 to real life engineering. This means we need to increase the range of effects and behaviours that can be expressed by the wings. Of course, we still use real-life data and scaling as much as we can - but we shouldn't let it get in the way of teaching important concepts. Numbers are important, but concepts more so. Here are some new concepts that you'll find in SP2:

• Control Surface Moments

In addition to increasing or reducing a wing's lift, control surfaces also apply a turning force to the wing they're on. In SP1, you can often deploy your flaps all the way to increase your turn rate and save yourself from an early introduction to the ground. This is less advisable in SP2, where flaps will correctly cause you to pitch down. This also means that elevators on delta wings can work without the fakery required in SP1.

• More in-depth customisation

As we mentioned in the previous blog, you can tune the airfoil parameters to change how your wing acts. This accentuates the difference between a docile trainer and an aggressively tuned fighter. The range of control surface types you've seen are also not just for show: each one affects your maximum lift, stall angle, moment and drag uniquely.

• Wing Efficiency

A key consideration when designing a wing is efficiency. It's easy to get buried in airfoil cross sections and forget that there's a third dimension down the span of your wing. We're experimenting with a new system that adds effects driven airflow along the span of your wing. You'll see that longer, thinner wings like you see on a glider are more efficient than shorter stubbier wings. This system makes it so that maximising the efficiency of your build is more than just reducing the frontal surface area for drag.

Drag

Speaking of drag, this was a fairly painful topic in SimplePlanes 1. The drag model had a ton of problems, which becomes quite apparent when you look at any of the top crafts on the website and notice that they typically have drag disabled on most of the parts.

In SimplePlanes 2, that old drag model is still there, but you can now choose to switch a craft to a brand new drag model that addresses many of the egregious issues with the old one. The new drag model uses the visual mesh of your craft rather than its colliders. This means the overall drag profile of your craft will be more accurate and intuitive. The curvature and angle of surfaces are now also taken into consideration.

Crafts using the new drag model should notice a significant reduction in overall drag, allowing for better speed. Performance should be better, especially with very large crafts. The frustrating issues with inexplicable asymmetrical drag should also be resolved.

The new model also has some cool new behaviours that weren’t in the old model:

• In-flight Drag Recalculation

  • Drag will now be automatically recalculated in-flight when the geometry of your craft changes, such as a part being detached or destroyed.

• Body Lift

  • Non-wing parts are now capable of generating a small amount of lift based on their angle of attack.

To complement the new drag model, we’ve completely overhauled the drag visualizer in the designer. It is now much more useful and very pretty, with a red to blue gradient depending on how prominent the drag is on a surface, and a pretty animation to go along with it. The new visualizer shows a much more accurate visual of the drag forces on your craft, showing exactly where the draggiest bits are instead of just highlighting entire parts based on their total drag, though you can re-enable that behaviour if you want to.

The drag visualizer can be tuned to your liking, allowing you to set an angle for the airflow as well as the maximum range of drag values to be shown. Note that as of writing this the visualizer doesn’t work on wings due to technical limitations, though by the time the game is released this may change.

If you like what you're seeing, please consider wishlisting the game. If you'd like to see bits of these blogs early, consider joining our Discord Server!