"Where the Heli You Been?" - SimplePlanes v1.8

It might take several hours for mobile devices to have the update delivered. Unfortunately, Amazon app store has been delayed and may take until Sunday or perhaps even Monday to reach your devices (depending on approval time)...sorry!

It's been a while since we had an update, but after several rounds of beta version 1.8 is now live on most platforms. It's packed with new features that we think you're all going to enjoy. To those of you who saw the beta posts, most of this will be familiar, but to those who did not, here are some highlights.

We've added rotor engines so the commoners among us can make helicopters without going to such great lengths to do so. They simulate ground effects, translational lift, and all the torques you can imagine thrown into the mix, which the tail has to deal with to settle things down. The rotors use actual wing physics to produce the lift at the blades, so if the tail isn't up to the task of countering the torque of the main rotor, things can get quite spinny. Even with all the standard options, we knew there would be cases where some people can't get their heli to fly quite like they'd wanted, so in addition to all those, there are a bunch of additional XML properties to really tweak it.

The aircraft carrier is now one of the most exciting places in the known universe, and has so much more room for activities! It has a catapult to launch random items (airplanes?) at blistering speeds. Wanna slow down? We've got you covered with an arresting hook to get things back to the sub-blistering range. If you stroll on over to the red boxes on the deck, be prepared for the ride of your life as the elevator brings you to the lower deck where the party really starts. Just kidding, there isn't much down there, but if you use your imagination, anything is possible!

The magnets and winches allow you to pick up all the trash you've been dropping around the islands and carry them to other parts where your guests can't see them.

In addition to all the features, there are lots of tweaks/bug-fixes, so make sure to check out the list. We wanted to thank all the beta testers for their hard work, they helped us find a lot of bugs that would've slipped past, it is much appreciated! On that note, there are still some issues that we're working on, which will be addressed in a post-launch update in the coming days.

FEATURES

• Added Helicopter Parts
  
  
  
  • Main Rotor: Highly customizable helicopter rotor system.
  
  
  • Tail Rotor: Counteracts torque from the main rotor system(s) and provides yaw control.
  
  
• Added Winch part: Rotating drum that extends and retracts a cable. Works great with the new magnet part.
• Added Magnet part: Turn it on with an AG and this powerful electromagnet will stick to anything with the slightest hint of metal.
• Added Hollow Fuselage part: The visuals are hollow, but the collider is quite solid.
• Added Arresting Hook part: Helps to slow down quickly when landing on the aircraft carrier
• Added Catapult Connector part: Tells the aircraft catapult where to connect to your plane. (Not strictly required for catapult connection.)
• Major updates to the USS Beast aircraft carrier
  
  
  
  • Brand new mesh
  
  
  • Catapult launch system
  
  
  • Arresting cables
  
  
  • Elevators
  
  
• Upgraded game engine to latest version of Unity (2018.3)
• Added new stock helicopter: Gator 2 (modeled after a Huey Gunship)
• Added Fast Forward mode
• Added Speed button so mobile players can switch between slow-motion and fast-forward modes.
• Added Autopilot On/Off button for mobile players
• Added shift+click to yank a single part off a disconnected part group in the designer.
• Added option to specify the "Engage At %" for a propeller engine's throttle governor.
• Added Delay setting for detachers to allow for delayed detachment.
• Added Reconnect Part button to designer for mobile players
• Added UI Scale slider to settings page in the main menu
• Added a VSync quality setting in the quality settings UI
• Added Sun Flare and Tone Mapping that can be toggled via a new Image Effects quality setting
• Added a camera look back (left/right) input for use in cockpit and first person cameras. Includes Cockpit/CameraVantage modifier XML attribute 'lookBackTranslation' to translate the camera (left/right, up/down) when looking back.
• Added a ModLoadLog.txt file that logs messages, warnings, and errors related to loading mods.

TWEAKS

• Improved UI for part rotation to allow entering exact angles.
• Save player's settings for nudge and rotate amounts in part transform flyout.
• Several performance improvements
• Added ability to set a part's Input to Disabled in the designer part properties
• Added bindable keyboard shortcuts for toggling Part Transform, Part Properties, and Color panels.
• Counter measures now have hidden autoDispenseDelay XML option.
• Updated the input system (hopefully better controller support)
• Updated SimplePlanes logo in the main menu
• Improved support for splane/spmod file association handling on Android (some file managers will still have issues unfortunately)
• Improved file association loading of splane/spmod files while the game is running for GOG / DRM-Free builds.
• Reduced part drag calculation precision in order to improve performance for calculating drag for large crafts.

BUG FIXES

• Fixed a bug where fuselage inlets would revert the player's changes when immediately selecting another fuselage inlet before closing the Part Properties.
• Fixed a bug where the nudge part inputs would not work until the transform part panel was opened
• Fixed a bug where the download progress bar would report very high values on Mac
• Fixed bug which could cause the propeller engines to hunt for target pitch and never be able to reach it...could cause wild swings in lift.
• Only display "Aircraft Damaged" in Sandbox if the plane is hostile.
• Fixed speed of destroyers to match the aircraft carrier's speed
• Fixed the wind heading not showing up in the compass.
• Fixed a bug where the rings would spin oddly after passing through them in a race
• Fixed a bug where the view would rotate backwards if the player attempted to rotate the view too quickly.
• Small islands are no longer shiny and are now have friction for wheels.
• Fixed a bug where two rigid bodies could not be connected directly to each other at more than one place. Existing aircraft will continue to work this way, but new aircraft will support multiple physics connections. Old aircraft can be updated to use the new approach by changing their legacyJointIdentification attribute to "false" via XML.
• Fixed a bug with multiple conflicting inputs being deactivated when activated via ActivateCameraLook
• Fixed the position of the scrollbar on the mods menu
• Fixed a texture quality issue with low quality water.
• Fixed a bug where the fuselage properties would revert player's input text if their number ended in a zero.
• Fixed a bug where a designer undo step would not always revert the craft to the correct version.

MODDING SUPPORT

• The build process and format of mods has slightly changed. When building mods for Windows/Mac, Unity will need both the Windows and Mac build components installed (mod tools should warn you if this is not the case). PC/Mac mods now include separate asset bundles for both platforms in a single mod file. You will likely noticed larger mod file sizes with this update. A new 'Debug' build option is available which builds the mod only for Unity's current target platform with the DEBUG symbol defined (should be a faster build than the other build options).
• A bunch of classes received interfaces which have been added to the mod tools. You may be able to get away with using less reflection code by taking advantage of these interfaces. These live in the "Jundroo.SimplePlanes.ModTools.Interfaces" namespace.
• Fixed a bug with the starting locations reflection proxy code which may have caused the spawining of AI aircraft to fail.
• Fixed a bug with mod level duplication when saving mods.
• Fixed a bug that prevented the cloning of parts with a hinge joint.
• Mod Builder Window style/layout tweaks
• Some additional info on changes and upgrading can be found on the modding wiki

POTENTIAL MOD-RELATED ISSUES

• Since we updated Unity with this upgrade, several mods are likely to be broken. For this reason, mods will be automatically disabled the next time you start SimplePlanes. Nathan has been able to find some very clever ways to allow some mods to still function, but several mods will be broken with this update. We recommend turning them on one by one and testing each one to verify whether or not they still functions and don't cause any problems.

Changes since last beta:

Tweaks

• Boat wake for aircraft carrier is disabled on mobile.

BUG FIXES

• Fixed collider misalignment on helicopter blades
• Fixed issue w/heli blade collider being incorrect when the hub is scaled.
• Fixed a bug where the camera could move wildly after un-pausing.