SimplePlanes 2 includes a number of new visual enhancements that drastically improve the look of the game compared to SimplePlanes 1.

To start, let’s talk about clouds. They technically existed in SP1, but they were baked into the skybox which pretty much meant they were fake and you couldn’t fly above them no matter how far into the sky you reached. SP2’s clouds, on the other hand, are volumetric, powered by an asset called Enviro by Hendrik Haupt. This means they’re 3D and very much “real”, making for a much more believable environment in the air than before.

In the world settings you can define the weather, ranging anywhere from a clear sky to dense fog to a thunderstorm. The clouds really help enhance the mood of SP2 and I hope you’ll feel the same way.

Let's play a little game: two of the four images in this section are references to popular media I care about, can you figure out what they are?

Clouds aren’t the only major visual improvement to the game. Thanks to a couple of powerful assets – Beautify and HBAO – we’re able to use a number of post-processing effects to make SimplePlanes 2 look nice and polished.

What is post-processing, you might ask? Without bogging you down with overly technical talk, it basically modifies the image after the game engine has rendered it in order to add extra visual enhancements to make things pop.

There are three main things we use post-processing for: colour balancing, bloom, and ambient occlusion (SSAO). Colour balancing lets us adjust the colours to be more (or less) vibrant, bloom creates a glow effect on bright objects like emissive paint or a smooth metallic surface being hit by sunlight, and ambient occlusion creates soft shadows in corners and other areas that would be obscured from the ambient lighting.

All of them can be customized in the game’s settings, letting you fine tune the game’s visuals to your liking. Want more bloom? No problem. Want the colours to be less saturated? Go ahead!

These add a lot to the game’s visual appeal and really help bring things up to a more modern graphical standard, with a fairly modest performance hit.

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!