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.

As of writing this, today 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!