Building immersive cockpits in SimplePlanes has never been an easy task, but that ends today. The new update brings a whole bunch of new parts and features that make this so easy that even I can build one now. Here's the new update trailer:

Image from Alisuchanka's P-40F-10 Warhawk

FUSELAGE SLICING

Use the new Fuselage Slicing to cut holes in your fuselages. The main purpose is to allow cutting holes for your new cockpits, but players have already found many other creative ways to use this new feature.

NEW AND UPGRADED STOCK CRAFTS

Several stock crafts have been upgraded with new, immersive cockpits. Wasp, Gator 2, Kicking Fish, Bush Plane, Pigpen, Hellkeska, Sea Plane, Twin Prop, and Vertigo all updated. P-51 updated with two variants, P-51-B and P-51-D.

SEVERAL NEW PARTS

Tons of new parts are available to build your own custom cockpits.

• 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.

Air To Air refueling

Put a Refuel Probe on your plane and spawn a tanker through the spawn sandbox AI dialogue.

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.

OTHER NEW TWEAKS AND FEATURES

• 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.
• Added 5 extra color slots for default themes.
• 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.
• 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.
• Added support for custom names for cameras.
• Added TargetLocked and TargetLocking variables accessible from Funky Trees.
• Made connections more predictable when using the “Add Section” button.
• 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.
• 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.
• Updated to Unity 2020.3.19

BUG FIXES

So many bug fixes. Too many to list here. Check the previous beta posts for a full listing of them.