Welcome to the much-awaited 1.11 beta! We've really had to do our best to bring it to you this month, so some things might be a little rough around the edges but we'll be fixing stuff as it comes up. This update mainly focuses on enabling builders to create immersive and part-efficient cockpits in their craft with much less hassle than before, which will make them far more suited to SimplePlanes VR, releasing alongside SP 1.12 which will contain mostly VR features for those who have purchased SPVR as well.

The beta will be available on the public-beta branch of Steam, and will come to mobile betas next week.

Below is our changelog, do read carefully because there's a lot of interesting new stuff in there.

• Features:
  
  
  
  • Fuselage Slicing. This adds fill percent sliders to the fuselage tool. These can act from either of 4 sides on each end, and each side defines a flat, infinite plane that the fuselage will be cut along. This allows you to create partial fuselages which are handy for cockpit enclosures.
  
  
  • Air To Air refueling – Put a Refuel Probe on your plane and spawn a tanker through the spawn sandbox AI dialogue. This was added for things to do in VR–only games.
  
  
  • Variables System – An aircraft now has a list of numeric variables that can be written to from certain sources and read from all FT expressions.
    
    
    
    
    
    • Each assignment to a variable also carries a “priority” which allows you to choose which assignments will override others if multiple attempt on the same frame.
    
    
    
    • Variables are mainly written from the aircraft’s list of variable setters, which is accessible from a button in the bottom right of the designer. Each row in this isn’t a variable, but represents an assignment to a variable (a variable is automatically created if it’s ever assigned to). This means you can assign the same variable multiple times in that frame, or have it updated from multiple sources. A setter takes in an FT expression and stores its result to a variable. It also has an activator function which can disable the setter but this is XML–only right now and pending a GUI.
    
    
    
    • Variables can also be written by part modifiers that have designated outputs. Currently the only one of these is a helicopter rotor that outputs its RPM to the variable RotorRPM for a gauge, but this may be expanded on in the future.
    
    
    
  
  
  • Added emission option to paint. Emissive paint do glowy. We assume no liability for exposure to radiation.
  
  
  • Added part hiding feature in the designer. You can conceal parts, show or hide concealed parts, invert the concealed part list, and other things.
  
  
  • Updated Stock Craft – Wasp, Gator 2, Kicking Fish, Bush Plane, Vertigo all updated. P-51 updated with two variants, P-51 Mustang and P-51-B.
  
  
  • New Wright airport, with an improved runway, taxiways, and more buildings.
  
  
• Parts:
  
  
  
  • Gauges – Instrument panel gauges used to display a piece of information (such as altitude or airspeed) with radial indicators.
  
  
  • Artificial Horizon – A standalone artificial horizon which appears to contain a ball, but does not require a cut–out in the panel to show depth.
  
  
  • Labels – Label parts, to add text or numbers to builds. Supports inputs within curly brackets, curvature, outline, gradients, and rich text formatting.
  
  
  • Simple Throttle – a standalone push–pull style throttle.
  
  
  • Fighter Throttle – a standalone slider type throttle with button.
  
  
  • Yoke – a standalone yoke part, with two handles.
  
  
  • Lever – a simple standalone lever that can be bound to any axis.
  
  
  • Control Base – A part that acts as a rotator and a grippable control, grip parts such as the joystick top can be placed on top of it. Each axis it takes an input that is also its output. This means it cannot be an arbitrary FT expression, but can be a flight control or a custom variable name.
  
  
  • Buttons – Interactable buttons that can be pushed to do stuff
  
  
  • Switches – Interactable switches that can be toggled to do stuff
  
  
  • Flight Computer – A 'cockpit' part with no camera that can act as a primary cockpit part.
  
  
  • Modern Joystick – A modern–style joystick grip part with a trigger and buttons.
  
  
  • Basic Joystick – An older looking joystick grip part with trigger and buttons.
  
  
  • Cylinder Grip – A basic grip part in the form of a cylinder.
  
  
  • Refuel Probe – A part that enables the “assist” mode of refueling from a drogue.
  
  
  • Refuel Drogue – Transfers fuel to other craft, designed to be trailed on a winch. Only used on the Tanker.
  
  
  • Seat – A simple seat part with built in camera.
  
  
  • Advanced Seat – A stronger fighter jet style seat. May add ejection functionality in the future.
  
  
  • Cockpit Canopy – A prebuilt glass canopy for 1–seat cockpits. Can open.
  
  
  • Basic Frame – A skeleton for the interior of a cockpit, which everything can stick to.
  
  
  • Modern Frame – Similar to Basic Frame, but with side areas for placing controls and a central divider between the pilot's legs.
  
  
  • Hollow Glass – A hollow glass part with tweaked rendering so the inside is not visible from outside, and the inside can be coloured differently to the outside. Recommend turning down the smoothness in the inside, as strong reflections from the canopy do not reflect the cockpit and can be very disorienting.
  
  
  • Wing Landing Gear Bare – new version of the wing landing gear with a different wheel and no attached fairing.
  
  
• Tweaks:
  
  
  
  • Updated the camera part to optionally support the gun reticle and missile targeting
  
  
  • Updated the cockpit modifier to optionally disable the camera vantage.
  
  
  • Updated the cameras to optionally act like a cockpit camera, using a priority based system.
  
  
  • Added support for custom names for cameras.
  
  
  • Updated the first person camera part to support an adjustable 'up offset'. Prior to this tweak, a hard–coded offset of 0.5 was used, meaning the camera would render half a meter above the visual mesh for the camera. This can now be adjusted. With a value of zero, the camera should render at the same position as the visual mesh.
  
  
  • The designer paint panel now dynamically adds colors to match the number of materials defined in XML.
  
  
  • Added 5 extra color slots for default themes.
  
  
  • Added TargetLocked and TargetLocking variables accessible from Funky Trees.
  
  
  • Made connections more predictable when using the “Add Section” button.
  
  
  • Added support for Slant Angle to all fuselage parts.
  
  
  • Maintain camera orientation when double-clicking to focus on a non-wing part.
  
  
  • CTRL+Click on the Input button in Part Properties to enter a Funky Trees expression.
  
  
  • Changed minimum zoom distance in the designer to from 0.5 to 0.05.
  
  
  • Hold left-shift to pan/rotation/zoom the camera at 10% normal speed.
  
  
  • Updated to Unity 2020.3.19
  
  
  • Changed name of designer categories: "Cockpits" to "Cockpit Basic".
  
  
  • Added XML attribute for the CowlFlaps on the WWII engine to hide the engine cowl (bool attribute is named "hide").
  
  
  • Added support for loading AI aircraft across multiple frames.
  
  
  • Added optional liftScale to Wing.State XML element.
  
  
  • Added optional throttleResponse attribute to Engine.State XML element to override the part type's throttleResponse.
  
  
  • Added "audio" XML attribute to JointRotator modifier so the annoying audio can be disabled.
  
  
  • Added Rpm1, Rpm2, Rpm3, and Rpm4 to the flight data accessible from Funky Trees. These predate the RotorRPM variable and are on a priority based system, supporting up to 4 sources. They can't be remapped manually, but they do support Car Engines as well as heli rotors.
  
  
  • Added collider attribute to Fuselage.State element to allow more accurate colliders on fuselage parts. Possible values are Auto, Basic, ConvexMesh, and NonConvexMesh. Note that NonConvexMesh will still be convex in flight due to physics limitations.
  
  
  • Hold left-shift to pan/rotation/zoom the camera at 10% normal speed.
  
  
• Fixes:
  
  
  
  • Fixed a bug where blueprint data would be cleared when not in use.
  
  
  • Fixed a bug where FT would fail to compile a zero–length string.
  
  
  • Fixed rotators playing audio when they are set to Floppy and their input is not zero.
  
  
  • Fixed a bug that would cause the wind audio to not be centered on first person view cameras.
  
  
  • Cockpits should no longer blast off into oblivion at ludicrous speeds.
  
  
  • Fixed some color bleeding on some of the icons and textures in the game.
  
  
  • Slightly raised the USS Beast launch location to prevent some craft from falling through the deck.
  
  
  • Fixed a bug that could cause some craft to be incorrectly positioned at the start of a level.
  
  
  • Fixed a bug where Jet Engine Nozzle Flaps responded directly to Throttle regardless of engine input.
  
  
  • Prevent long expressions from spilling out of Input button in Part Properties.
  
  
  • Fixed fuselage normals appearing to show a "zig zag" pattern
  
  
• Performance:
  
  
  
  • Improved performance and fixed memory leaks releated to painting crafts.
  
  
  • Many peformance and memory optimizations related to craft loading. High part count crafts, particularly those with many fuselages, should load quicker and with less memory consumption.
  
  
• Visuals:
  
  
  
  • Switched to linear color space
  
  
  • Atmosphere visual tweaks
  
  
  • Improved reflections in water from far away
  
  
  • Removed the 'SP Classic' and 'Static–Low' craft reflections settings. 'Static–High' is now 'Static'.